At Marie Curie, a large charity in the UK that supports people at the end of their lives, Gemma Rawlins leads the Fundraising Innovation Team. The charity attracts £175 million in giving each year in order to provide incredible care for patients and their families.
At the 2025 Agile in Nonprofits (AiN) Summit, Gemma shared this team’s Agile story in her presentation titled “Using Agile to Transform Innovation.”
The folks at Marie Curie tasked with the organization’s fundraising, as well as everyone in fundraising worldwide, continually seek new and better approaches that can help reach ever-growing goals to meet ever-growing need; and the sooner a promising method or strategy can be ready to roll, the better.
But, just prior to adopting Agile, a significant hurdle for Gemma’s team was their lengthy innovation process, typically requiring six months from idea generation, to testing, and then to marketing. Not to mention that they also were experiencing overwhelm, low morale, and frustration from stakeholders and the organization itself. Gemma could see that they needed to research and introduce smart ways to enhance their processes.
They chose to try Agile. Some people on her team had varying levels of prior Agile experience. So, to give everyone on the team equal understanding and knowledge, they invested in Agile training, during which they selected the Agile principles they would focus on. Watch Gemma’s 2025 AiN Summit video to hear about which ones they ultimately adopted.
Gemma talks about how their Agile integration led to shared information, shared visibility, a growing following of Agile colleagues, and much more. And ultimately, the innovation process was efficiently shortened to just six to eight weeks!
At Agile in Nonprofits, we talk all the time about Agile making the way for processes to require “half the time,” but Gemma’s team far exceeded that mark!
They also experienced many more positives and learned much as a result of integrating Agile into their ways of thinking. And their organization is trialing Agile with additional colleagues!
We recommend trialing Agile within your team as well. You absolutely can do it, and we can be your guides.
Would you like to make your processes truly efficient and influence your colleagues? We will help you. Definitely watch Gemma’s presentation. And check out resources for learning from Agile in Nonprofits, including the Agile journey map, or reach out to us directly.
Or inspire others by commenting and sharing your own story about Agile success!