Fundraising

The operation of a development organisation depends heavily on fundraising. This module focuses on the what, who, why, and how of fundraising and outlines the stages for developing a fundraising strategy. There are useful tools and examples across all core processes from procurement to utilization of funds.

Fundraising Readiness

Fundraising is a process of seeking and gathering voluntary financial contributions by ‘engaging individuals, businesses, charitable foundations, or governmental agencies towards building a voluntary sector and provide a wide spectrum of services that benefits social causes.

It involves ways for organizations to attract like-minded people to build sustainable relationships and partnerships and also entrench its values and approaches into the fund-raising strategy and plans.

Before one sets out on the colossal task of raising funds for deploying in programs that create social value, setting some strong foundational base for better fundraising and project implementation outcomes is key.

What is Fundraising Readiness?

Obtaining the necessary funds is a challenge requiring a multipronged approach that employs necessary research, fundraising plans, communication strategy and execution.

A key aspect to formulating a winning fundraising strategy is conducting sufficient research into the donor landscape, identifying the segment of donors that would best be suited to the mission, organization size, access, level of complexity of the program, among other aspects.

The success of a fundraising campaign requires a concise and a well-executed process of well-defined components and is determined by meticulous planning and preparation

An organization contemplating Fundraising needs to assess and evaluate its readiness to raise money. A best place to start fundraising is from a position of preparedness and strength, by building the organisation’s capacity by methodically working through certain key and crucial areas to deliver donor expectations.

This involves assembling a team of both the leadership and the staff from all the functions who through their experience and expertise can help in identifying the areas, approaches, time and the resources required in strengthening the organisation’s capacities to achieve readiness.

Before embarking on developing a fundraising strategy and plan, it is recommended that the organisations do a self-evaluation to assess the organisations strength and areas of improvement and build capacities to support the strategies developed to raise the funds.

At the outset, determining the level of organisation readiness for fundraising can prove to be highly valuable. Subsequently, the organisation can analyse the amount of funds needed, the kind of potential partners and donors that can be approached.

The self-evaluation results may indicate an organisation with very high confidence and raring to go. Or it may have several strengths, but some areas which calls for strengthening. Depending on where it’s positioned, it can begin the FR process right away or mobilise some strengthening endeavours before it actually begins the fund-raising action.

Please refer the Self-evaluation checklist in the FR Playbook and use the result to determine the level of readiness

Useful Links

https://www.tgci.com/sites/default/files/pdf/Fundraising%20Readiness_1.pdf

https://www.solidgroundconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Assessing_Fundraising_Readiness.pdf

https://www.qgiv.com/blog/fundraising-faq/







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