Meet our Advisers: Camilla Leigh
“GoodBox’s launch and growth in the UK is very exciting to witness. I wait with great anticipation to see the power of this technology in more advanced philanthropic cultures, such as the United States and Canada. Today the UK, tomorrow the world!”
Continuing our introductory series, we’d like to introduce you to Camilla Leigh: the Chair of our Advisory Board. Camilla has been with us since January 2017 and helps keep the Board up to date on everything going on within the company. With an extensive background in philanthropy, she provides us with unique insight from a charity’s perspective and has a wealth of experience in fundraising. Currently a founding partner at Philanthropica, Camilla has over 20 years of fundraising management and leadership positions in Europe and North America. In this time, she has personally raised more than $90m. Camilla’s experience ranges from start-up fundraising program development, to assisting growth in seasoned fundraising organisations.
I’ve worked as a fundraiser in the non-profit world since 1995 – both in the UK and in North America. If you can cast your memory back, that was the year DVDs and Sony PlayStations entered our lives for the first time. It is slightly mind boggling to think about all the different waves of technology since then, and of all the ways technology has permeated our daily lives – changing both our behaviours and how organizations interact with us. That is, except for the charity sector, where we are still using many of the fundraising tools and strategies that were being used 30+ years ago!
Where technology has managed to break through into the under-invested and under-developed world of non-profits with fundamental digital tools, such as online payments and social media, major fundraising innovations and steep growth in donated revenues have followed. JustGiving, DonorDrive and the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge are a few examples of this technology driven growth in charity fundraising.
When I first met Andrew O’Brien, GoodBox’s CEO, and he presented GoodBox to me, I saw a terrific international opportunity to bring much needed new tools to the charity sector that will enable and encourage more people to give. By providing a mechanism to donate that reflects how people carry and transact money today, we can potentially unlock billions of pounds, dollars and euros in charitable donations, and empower non-profits to create more good that benefits all of us.
GoodBox’s launch and growth in the UK is very exciting to witness. I wait with great anticipation to see the power of this technology in more advanced philanthropic cultures, such as the United States and Canada. Today the UK, tomorrow the world!
