Because I’m a bit of a musician I’ve always understood the difference between Digital and Analog, and at first there was no comparison. An analog sound is like a story, like a piece of art. It’s not real, its somebody’s creation – literally analogous. It’s a rebel and a romantic. Its vinyl, FM, a Breitling watch, a cherry red Stratocaster, or a Hammond B3 through a Leslie amp.

Digital is nothing but a bleep by comparison. It’s digits, Casio, numbers, LCDs and the cold, crystal, clarity of the Compact Disk. But its march is relentless and all pervading. And here we are.

As a Fundraiser, Digital first meant Colin. Colin was the IT guy at the charity where I worked and wow, did he live up to the stereotype. Geek didn’t begin to tell the story. He used to sit in front of the server – a whole room of yellow wires and black boxes and flashy lights. And floppy disks! Hundreds of floppy disks. There was also a printer, so noisy that it was in a box. You had to align the holes in the special paper that came with it to a set of hooked teeth on the printer drum. Even with the lid closed it roared. Colin loved it.

Bit by little bit, this funny world of digital started impacting on our fundraising. When I started fundraising in the mid-80s Word Processors had just been made commercially available. Our charity had two – piled on top of each other in a corner as the General Secretary refused to use them, preferring her trusty typewriter and carbon paper.

When she retired, I dusted one down and started using it to write “the same letter” to several trusts. It was like magic. As we grew and became a fundraising team, we got our first database. So terrified were we that someone might break in and steal it, we decided to regularly back it up onto Colin’s server. 

What a circus that was – the floppy disks mountain grew and grew and we managed to baffle ourselves completely by having our regional fundraisers post their floppy disk version of the database to us every week. That didn’t end well!

Soon we had a website, and then social media and then cloud systems and then he appeared, like Colin on steriods – a Digital Fundraiser. He was like a T3 sent from the future to make sure the machines were victorious. His time was short though and although the machines were in fact victorious, the Digital Fundraiser died and ALL FUNDRAISERS became partially digital. And we will become more so.

There have been so many false dawns for “online fundraising” as it used to be called. We thought it was going to be the next big thing, but its taken about 40 years for us to realise that it’s not a thing, it’s a channel. 

It is not fundraising, it is a way to communicate ABOUT fundraising. It’s a very important channel, so important and game-changing that the creation of the printing press is relatively meaningless next to it. But if we start to think about Digital as an end in itself, then it is not serving us – we are serving it. 

We cannot fundraise the way that digital allows us to – we must harness digital to let us fundraise as we always have. By expressing the value of our cause to people with the capacity and desire to support it.

Maybe the machines won’t be victorious after all. Maybe the fundraisers of the world will get back to raising money instead of tweeting. Or maybe they’ll learn how to use those tweets to raise money. Like I have, when I became The Digital Man.