We all know that the art and the science of fundraising is about much more than asking for gifts and grants and receiving them. In the early stages in particular, it’s about preparedness.
What do you need to do to prepare your organisation for fundraising success, both in terms of fundraising strategy and, just as importantly, in terms of your organisation (systems and processes) and your colleagues?
How can we think short term and long term at the same time? How can we develop a balanced portfolio of income streams? How can we analyse what types of fundraising are working and what will work in future for us? How do we plan our fundraising activity while making sure we are ‘back-office’ ready? How do we keep it alive and get buy-in from all our colleagues?
In short, how do you make sure you are set up to be successful with your fundraising? Richard Sved, author of Charity Fundraising Templates and co-author of Fundraising Strategy, both published by Directory of Social Change, provides some top tips on how to do just that.
Think strategically
- Link your fundraising strategy to your organisational strategy
Put simply, in order to be as effective as possible, try and link your fundraising strategy (what money your organisation needs to raise and how) to your organisational strategy (what your organisation does with the money and why). On the fundraising side, your “top-line” thinking should encompass audiences, messages and tactics, while on the organisational strategy side, as an overview, focus on your organisation’s vision, mission and objectives. Because essentially your fundraising needs to be about helping your charity to achieve its mission, and being clear about this in your case for support will give you the best chance of success.
- Set out your fundraising planning process
Your planning for your fundraising should help you get from where you are now to where you need to be to fund your organisational strategy. You may find it helpful to divide your thinking into four separate stages:
-
- Audit: Where are we now? (current fundraising performance, internal strengths and weaknesses, external environment, opportunities and threats)
- Objectives: Where do we want to be?
- Strategy: How will we get there?
- Tactics: What will we do to get there?
- Think about your fundraising portfolio
How do you consider which of your fundraising activities or fundraising ‘products’ you should pursue or invest in? We suggest a range of considerations, which you might like to plot in charts or tables. These can include:
-
- Boston Matrix: financial return against growth potential https://www.bcg.com/about/overview/our-history/growth-share-matrix
- Ansoff’s Growth Matrix: How you can develop or diversify your fundraising products and/or audience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansoff_matrix
- Return on Investment: calculated, in simple terms, by dividing income by expenditure
Get organisation-ready
- Inputs, outputs, outcomes and impact
Many funders ask to see outcomes and impact of your organisation or a specific activity they are funding or considering funding. Work with your colleagues to understand the following:
-
- Inputs: money, staff, resources, time you put into your organisation’s activities, services or products
- Outputs: the activities, services and products that your organisation provides
- Outcomes: the changes, benefits, learning or other effects that happen as a result of your organisation’s activities, services or products
- Impact: the (often longer-term) change, effect or benefit that your organisation’s activities, services or products have on wider society.
- Consider your fundraising processes involved
Before you undertake any type of fundraising, you need to consider the processes involved in order for it to run smoothly. These will differ depending on the income stream, and you should also prepare how you will need to interact with other business areas, such as finance, customer and supporter care/engagement, as well as those colleagues who are delivering your charity’s work.
- Address your fundraising risks
Successful fundraising is as much about identifying and managing risks as it is about reward! You may like to categorise your consideration about risks in the following areas:
-
- Compliance: are you fully compliant with laws and codes of practice? Are these likely to change?
- Ethical: do you have a clear ethical fundraising policy in place?
- Financial: might costs be higher than you have planned for? Or income lower than you’ve budgeted?
- Logistical: might it be difficult to deliver projects in time?
- Relational: how might relationships with key stakeholders be affected?
- Reputational: is it possible that your reputation or brand might be damaged?
- Strategic: how might the world you’re operating in change and thus invalidate your approach?
Get your colleagues on board
- Involve your colleagues at every step
Make sure your colleagues feel genuinely involved in the process of developing your fundraising strategy and in fundraising itself. You could, and arguably should, bring them in through much of the other thinking elsewhere in this article. Get their opinion and listen to it. - Get leadership buy-in
To ensure the support of your senior colleagues, you may like to think about three ‘types’ of knowledge that might be important to them and how you will cater to them: strategic (understanding broader organisational goals), relational (understanding the key players in the decision and how they might react) and knowledge of organisational norms (for example, how the organisation presents information).
- Understand how colleagues might react to changeWhy might you encounter resistance around fundraising, and what can you do about it? It can be helpful to consider whether your colleagues are in any of the following overlapping ‘camps’:
-
- ‘I don’t get it’: there may be an information gap here. How can you improve communication with them and check that you understand each other?
- ‘I don’t like it’: there may be an emotional or values gap between you. How can you build excitement about the project and remove fear of it?
- ‘I don’t trust you/the organisation’: in this case, you may well need to address a relationship gap. How can you build or rebuild mutual trust and repair damaged relationships?
Remember that you are helping your organisation and your colleagues to make a difference to your beneficiaries/cause through your fundraising success. You’re in it together!
Useful Further Reading
https://www.dsc.org.uk/publication/charity-fundraising-templates/
Richard Sved, DSC Associate and Founding Director at 3rd Sector Mission Control
Richard Sved is an experienced senior manager with a strong track record of strategic and operational excellence in the charitable and cultural sectors. He has led the fundraising team at eleven national charities, and also has experience of policy, communications, mentoring, governance and organisational strategy development. The author of two publications on fundraising strategy and fundraising development, his key strengths lie in income generation, charity governance, and strategic planning. In his spare time, Richard is the Chair of St Albans City Band (and their Solo Tenor Horn player), is the Event Director of St Albans parkrun, and a season ticket holder of Arsenal Women’s Football Club.