People have been trying to find an alternative to sugar for more than a century (the first version of saccharine came out in the 1880s).

Today, with government and public opinion increasingly antagonistic to sugar and blaming it for the obesity crisis, the food industry is scrambling for ways to reduce sugar without affecting the taste.

It’s not easy. For example, Asapartame is great for fizzy drinks, but it separates when heated, so is unsuitable in anything baked.

An Israeli start-up DouxMatok has a promising candidate. Its product, Incredo, ingeniously infiltrates regular sugar with tiny grains of silica, a common ingredient in the food industry. These grains are invisible and tasteless.

The result is 99% sugar, but when it hits the tongue, the silica ceases to bond with the sucrose, greatly expanding the surface area of the sucrose that liquefies on contact with the saliva. It means it’s incredibly sweet, which in turn means you can use far less of it.

That idea, of taking what you’ve got and getting a far more intense response, is the holy grail for your fundraising.

Understandably, you probably don’t have the stomach right now for long-term brand-building or supporter acquisition. It’s all about: what can deliver me money right now?

So, of course you turn to your most loyal and generous supporters. How can you increase the intensity of feeling they have towards you, and turn that into donations?

You know what the typical solutions are. And you need something better than typical results. How do you find something different, something original, fresh, surprising?

You do what DouxMatok do. You experiment. You test.

And when you find something that works, you roll this out across all your supporters. Then you’ve hit pay dirt.

Sweet.