Recap IFC Pop-Up Nairobi 2025

Last year's Pop-Up, hosted by the Kenya Association of Fundraising Professionals in partnership with The Resource Alliance, brought together four speakers whose work had very much diversity, an environmental campaigner, a creator-economy specialist, two people thinking hard about AI and leadership, and a donor retention practitioner from Argentina.

What tied them together was less a shared topic than a shared instinct: the organisations winning right now are the ones willing to move faster, look closer, and rebuild systems that were designed for a slower, less personal era of giving.

Here's what came out of the room.

When the moment arrives before the plan does...

Tracy Makheti, who leads global digital and engagement work for Greenpeace Africa's Forest Solutions Project, opened with two campaigns that had nothing to do with a fundraising calendar and everything to do with reacting to the world as it actually unfolds.

The first was the Kenya Forests Campaign. When a logging ban that had protected several forest reserves came under threat of reversal, Greenpeace Africa didn't wait for a quarterly campaign cycle to respond. Within three days of launch, the campaign had reached the Ministry of Environment. Within a weekend, an email calling for shares had generated over 21,000 signatures from WhatsApp alone, 19,000 of them from people the organisation had never reached before. The ban held.

The second, in Tanzania, followed a carbon credit deal signed at COP27 that put Maasai land and livelihoods at risk. Here the organisation had to do something harder than move fast; it had to listen to what was actually happening on the ground before deciding what the campaign should say. What they learned didn't always match the government's framing, and the campaign's strength came from resisting the urge to guess.

What Makheti's talk really argued for wasn't speed for its own sake. It was the discipline of building the muscle for speed in advance; a team whose job is to watch for the moment, a shared protocol for what happens when it arrives, and enough trust in local knowledge to act on real signals rather than assumptions. For organisations here that are still structured around annual campaign calendars, that's a genuinely uncomfortable but necessary provocation.

The trust question nobody wants to ask about influencers.

Raefah Makki, who leads campaigns and individual giving work, spent her session on a question many organisations have quietly decided not to examine too closely: whether creators and influencers are a real fundraising channel, or a distraction dressed up as innovation.

Her position, grounded in both data and a hard case study, was that the scepticism is starting to look outdated. Influencer-led campaigns are returning close to six times their cost, and younger donors increasingly extend more trust to creators than to institutions or celebrities — a shift that should worry any organisation still building its entire donor pipeline around traditional media relationships.

The case study that anchored the talk was a campaign to revive public attention on the Sudan crisis, at a point when the story had largely fallen out of the news cycle. Working with creators didn't just generate donations, it generated searches, return visits, and a measurable curiosity that traditional appeals hadn't managed to produce. But Makki was equally honest about the cost of doing this well: the strongest of these relationships took roughly two years to build, and donors acquired through creator campaigns tend to be easier to bring in than to keep. This isn't a shortcut, but a different, slower kind of relationship-building that happens to use a newer set of tools.

Leadership, not tools, is the real AI conversation

The session from Kaz McGrath of PLAI, together with Maisa Gomes Lopes of the Cerebral Palsy Alliance, deliberately avoided the conversation most organisations expect to have about AI; which tool to buy, which policy to write. Instead, it asked what's actually going wrong in how leaders are responding to the shift.

Their observation, drawn from work across the sector, was that most resistance to AI isn't really about the technology. It's a leadership problem wearing a technology costume: leaders who don't yet have the literacy to separate genuine capability from hype, cultures that quietly punish the kind of experimentation AI adoption requires, and leaders themselves opting out  not through any stated decision, but through simple avoidance.

The provocation left in the room was uncomfortable in a useful way: "if AI is reorganising how work gets done across every sector, the people responsible for deciding how their organisations respond are, by their own admission, often the least equipped to make that call." Their answer wasn't a training programme or a new department. It was smaller and harder leaders modelling curiosity in public, one visible action at a time, rather than waiting to feel ready.

Retention is a data problem before it's a loyalty problem.

Closing the day, Ambar Chacin of Amnesty International Argentina made the case that donor retention, (an area many organisations treat as a communications function) is really a question of what an organisation does with the data it already has.

Her team's shift wasn't about acquiring new tools so much as using their existing donor and supporter data with more discipline: personalising the journey a supporter goes through after their first gift, building recognition and reward structures that reflect what a donor has actually done rather than treating every donor the same, and layering timely, relevant content into the relationship instead of relying solely on scheduled asks.

The honesty in her talk was in what she flagged as the limits of this approach. A loyalty programme, she was clear, is not a fix on its own; it fails as often as it succeeds, and the difference tends to come down to whether an organisation keeps refining it or simply launches it and moves on. For organisations here weighing whether to invest in retention infrastructure, that's a useful caution against treating any single tool as the answer.

What this adds up to ...

The four sessions pointed at the same underlying shift from different directions. The organisations pulling ahead aren't necessarily the best resourced, they're the ones that have learned to notice what's actually happening, whether that's a breaking news moment, a donor's giving pattern, a creator's audience, or their own leadership blind spots, and to act on that information before it goes stale. None of the tools discussed, WhatsApp, creator partnerships, AI, CRM personalisation, did the work by themselves. In every case, they amplified a decision that a person had already made to pay closer attention.

That's precisely the kind of translation IFC Pop-Up Nairobi exists for: taking ideas shaped in Noordwijk and testing whether they survive contact with how fundraising actually works here. Based on this session, most of them do, provided organisations are willing to build the internal habits these speakers described, rather than waiting for a tool to do it for them.

Join the next one

The next IFC Pop-Up Nairobi is being planned, and if the conversations above are the kind of thinking you want in the room with you, it's worth holding the date.

COMING SOON THIS 24th SEPTEMBER 2026..... !!!