Monday, June 21st, 2010 at
Creating a compelling ‘case for support’ is the key to successful fundraising for the whole of your organisation. If at any point anyone involved with you is unclear about what you do and why you do it, it will reflect badly on the organisation as a whole. In marketing terms the saying goes: ‘a confused buyer never buys’ and so it is when also looking at potential funders. A funder who is confused about what and why you do what you do will rarely bother to dig deeper to find out and simply move on to the next charity who has clear goals and a compelling case for support.
There is a fundraising cycle and the very beginning of that cycle is the ‘Case Statement’ – the reason your organisation is needing funds.
You will need to answer these 7 questions:
- Who are you as an organisation
- Why do you exist
- What is distinctive/different about you
- What do you want to accomplish
- How do you plan to go about it
- What makes you competent to do it
- How will you be accountable for what you do
By answering these questions you will get a clear understanding of why you are asking for funding – and so will all potential funders!
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Friday, June 18th, 2010 at
Three Big Funders
I thought it would be useful to have a brief overview of Three Big Funders in the UK. The three questions I’m going to be answering are:
- What do they fund?
- How much can you be awarded?
- Is it open bidding?
What do they fund? “The Lottery” are a group of funders all supporting different activities. You would need to go to their website to find out what each individual funder supports. If you subscribe to the GiveUsTheFish list you will be sent a comprehensive report called The Fundraising Report, which apart from many other gems of information lists all of the funders and gives lots of information about each of them. There are specialist funders for Heritage and Sport and The Arts. Some of the funders only operate in England, Scotland or Wales, whilst others are focussed on the whole of the UK. How much can you be awarded? Each programme has it’s own level of funding – click on the links above to find out more about each one. It starts at around £500 to an unlimited amount of funding, depending on who you are and what you want to fund. Is it open bidding? Some of the programmes have open bidding, such as Awards For All, others have set times that you can bid. Read the rest of this entry