Fundraising strategies

One of the realities for voluntary and community sector organisations is that there is nearly always more things that you want to do than there is money and resources to do them.  The other reality is that it is difficult to be confident of developing sustainable funding.  This means that voluntary and community groups can spend a lot of time trying to find the money to do the things they want to do.

One way of trying to tackle this problem is for you to develop a longer term view of how many resources you need and how you might go about securing them; your Funding Strategy and Plan. This might seem like an onerous task but actually most of the effort should be placed in the thinking and not the writing.

A useful resource to get you started is a document by the workforce and governance hub 'funding and costing workforce and governance development - a resource for the voluntary and community sector' which can be downloaded here.

The first thing to do when thinking about a longer term fundraising strategy and plan is to develop a "Business Strategy and Business Plan" for your group or organisation.  This will set out the purpose and role of your group or organisation, the broad approach you will take to achieve these things and some detailed ideas of the specific activities that you want to undertake.  As part of this you should also establish the level of resources that you will need to complete the activities you think you need to undertake.

Once you have a clear idea of how much money you want to secure and what you want the money for can you begin to think about how you will raise the money. 

The first step in this is to think about all the possible sources of money and resources.  The following is a list of some of these but you can perhaps think of more:

You can get more information about these in Step 2: Who's got the money?

The question you have to answer is where are we most likely to secure the resources we need?

Ideally you will be able to identify two or three which offer the best chance of securing the money that you need.  Your choice will depend on a lot of factors such as who will do the work, have we got lots of volunteers, is what we are doing popular with the public, does it fit with the priorities of statutory bodies, can we charge for any of our services, etc? 

Having decided on the most likely sources of money to support the work you want to do it is then necessary to begin the process of deciding which activities can be supported by which sources of money and how much each of the approaches might realise.  You should set some targets for the amount of money to be raised by each approach during each year of the strategy. These are sometimes called the milestones.

Finally you need to move from strategy to more detailed planning.  In this stage you flesh out precisely how you will approach securing the resources from each of the sources. This will mean identifying target grant givers or sponsors or statutory sector bodies.  You could search the database of grant givers.  You will also need to identify who and how you will go about doing the work necessary. This might mean thinking about employing someone to undertake the fundraising or including this task in a job description of a member of staff, volunteer or Board Member.

For long-term planning having some project plans ready on the shelf can be a great advantage.  Funding deadlines can be very tight and being able to respond quickly is very useful.  Sometimes money becomes available at the end of  a financial year and those that can respond with a bid which they have already done some work on will be in a great position to win this funding.

Of course once you have your fundraising strategy and plan you need to revisit it to see how you are getting on, to change it in the face of changing circumstances.  The process just goes on and on!

You may be able to get help with developing a funding strategy and a business plan. Look at the section on Getting Help