Sozialwerke Sieber & Swiss Multiple Sclerosis Society among 2018 Swissfundraising Award winners

Zurich based non-profit Sozialwerke Sieber has received the 2018 Swissfundraising’s Action of the Year Award, with the Swiss Multiple Sclerosis Society winning the Innovation of the Year category.

The charities received their awards during this year’s annual Swissfundraising conference SwissFundraisingDay.

Sozialwerke Sieber received Swissfundraising’s Action of the Year Award for the outstanding return (1.5 million CHF or €1.29 million) of its cross media campaign ‘Living at the best residential address’.

The NGO cares for the homeless and the title referred to the fact that in one of the world’s richest cities, homeless people are sleeping on benches by the lake or in the doorways of the financial district. The campaign combined a mail package, Facebook posts and street action with cardboard, which the homeless often use to cover themselves. It was also the campaign that received the highest number of votes from SwissFundraisingDay delegates.

Meanwhile, the Swiss Multiple Sclerosis Society won the Innovation of the Year Award for its campaign that saw people affected by the illness gather together in seven Swiss cities and form letters of the alphabet, spelling out the word ‘Signal’. The campaign demonstrated how multiple sclerosis can be so disruptive to the body’s nervous system and its ability to communicate, generating awareness through social media.

The one-day conference in the Swiss capital Bern started with a keynote by speaker Alan Clayton, and featured approximately a dozen speakers as well as workshops and case studies, with Clayton following his keynote speech with a masterclass on Great Fundraising on day two for a selected audience.

Swissfundraising’s next event is a French language conference, Journées romandes de formation, which will take place on 9 October in Lausanne, with a hundred delegates expected to attend. As with SwissFundraisingDay, the conference is open to everybody in the sector. The day after the conference, delegates will be able to subscribe to seminars, known as cours intensifs. One is about using crowdsourcing and coworking spaces, one an introduction in legacy fundraising.