- By Heather Thomas
This interactive workshop is structured so that you walk away with a rough plan to meet your funding needs. We’ll explore how your organisational strategy impacts your funding outlook, how to pitch your project to specific audiences, how to identify prospective donors and potential sources of funding.
1. YOU ARE A FUNDRAISING
ACE
Whether you realise it or
not!
Heather Thomas
@The Eden Project
20. 05. 2017
2. SO, WHO THE HECK IS HEATHER?British/American Mutt with German in
laws and 4 years of Nordic life
Purpose: Inspire Connectivity and
Disrupt the Idea that Man sits at the top
of the food chain
17 year career in fundraising: Sustain,
The Reader, Mindful Kitchen, Tate,
Royal Academy, YouthNet(8 years at
EMT)
Skill strengths and passions: strategy,
fundraising, communications,
innovation, stakeholder engagement
CBS MBA
Social Enterprise Founder: Mindful
Kitchen
3. OUR WORKSHOP OBJECTIVES
1. Learn how to put your talents
to work
2. Explore organisational
storytelling
3. Draft your fundraising story
4. Mentally list your next steps
…getting you one step closer to
THE MONEY, thanks Cuba
4. WHAT MAKES A GREAT
FUNDRAISER?
Talk through the following questions w/ your group:
1.) What PERSONALITY TRAITS do fundraisers possess?
2.) What SKILLS do fundraisers posses??
For self reflection:
3.) Which of these traits and skills do you possess?
4.) Which of these traits and skills do you want to
improve, or ‘buy in’?
5. FUNDRAISING IS STORYTELLING
1. How does your story create
meaning?
2. How does your story stand
out?
3. How does your story create
action?
6.
7. VALUE PROPOSITION:
THE MERGE OF YOUR PAIN/SOLUTION = THE ESSENCE
OF YOUR USP
iTunes:
You’ve never been so easily entertained. The new iTunes
makes it easier than ever to browse and organize your music,
movies, TV shows and more. Add it to your collection. And
play it all, anywhere.
Spotify:
Soundtrack of your life. Let Spotify bring you the right music
for every mood and moment. The perfect songs for your
workout, your night in, or your journey to work.
QUESTIONS: Do the value propositions demonstrate different customer
problems? Solutions? How might the value propositions reflect differences in
target customers?
8. • Letter of
Inquiry
• Grant Proposal
• Power Point
Pitch
• Proposal
• Email
• Conversation
• Web
• Web
• Social Media
• Email
Individual
Major
Donor
FoundationBusiness
11. FUNDRAISING ACE TOP
TAKEAWAYS
1.) Storytellers and Relationship Builders make great fundraisers
2.) Your organisational strategy IS your story.
3.) Share your story in a way that is relevant to your audience.
4.) Diversify your revenue streams.
5.) Focus on win/wins. Prioritise and use your time wisely.
Tell story about Hilary Lucier: what it means to be in development and fundraising = creativity and leadership
Use flip chart to bring conversation together. Two columns: Personality and Skills
Personality:
2 points to make:
1.) These traits are what I like to think of myself as possessing on my best days. How about you guys, familiar? If you are like me, however, I really do mean this is me on my BEST days. I am not all of these things, all the time. Self care is important as you dig into the fundraising trenches. Giving 150% is important to get the job done well. So, pace yourself.
2.) The other way to be that person more often that not, of course, is skills development and planning. The hard skills help you to deliver your soft skills with more grace and consistency. So, let’s connect the dots here. Over to skills.
SKILLS notes:
For some reason it takes a long time for people to get to finance. I reinforce (and this makes people nervous at times) that they need to know how to read a Balance Sheet and interpret their org’s latest Annual Accounts (or forecast if they are newbies) and if they don’t, talk to your Finance person, Treasurer or find a mate who is an accountant. Numbers are a language and they tell stories that funders will expect you to be able to interpret.
Major point: all of the skills equate to relationship management. Event the hardest of skills like finance. The word relationship sometimes take people a long time to get to. If they aren’t getting to the words I expect to hear, I ask them to pause for a minute, close their eyes, picture a person in their lives who they’ve known for a long time, who they love, with whom they have had normal ups and downs and think about skills that have helped maintain that relationship. That always gets the ideas flowing. I often use this idea to reinforce the finance thing with a lighthearted, c’mon, anyone who is in a long term relationship knows that even money can be something that needs to be communicated well – or hey, even your flatmate pulling his/her weight. So, inherently in our personal lives we get that organisation, communication, forward planning, structure and finance skills play a roll. Now if that’s the case with your loved ones, it’s even more so in the professional world when effectively you’re trying to get people to share your passion for a cause.
If you’re wary about fundraising, let that go and get comfortable with story telling. I bet you’re a pro at that! Whether it’s telling someone about your trip down here or your child about the tooth fairy – storytelling is something we do everyday. Great stories are – ones you can relate to, ones with characters who have challenges that they overcome, and you get excited about going on the journey with them, ones that have messages that people can walk away with and remember, ones that make your story different from other people’s story. Ice bucket challenge: people were creating their OWN stories, and it had a feel good factor…RA, collection of amazing people, not paintings. Bring people along on the story and THEN make the ask.
But we’re NOT telling a bedtime story, we’re trying to fundraise. So, how do we adapt our storytelling in a professional way? One tool I really like working with is the Business Model Canvas. Whether you’re going for corporate, individual, trust and foundation or major donor money – this is a great place to start. It helps you go on the journey of WHY you exist (for your beneficiaries) to why it is relevant to the lives of the people you are raising money from to how you are going to identify those folks, to how you are going to reach them, to how you are going to measure your success to how you are going to pay for it!
Let’s move away from fundraising for a second to illustrate a point. Does everyone at a minimum realise that iTunes and Spotify are digital music services? Great! Now forget your biases or anything you know about them (don’t think about the pink elephant!). In your position as a consumer, how do you think these props are talking about different solutions to different problems? Are they talking to different people? Who do you think the person is that each are talking to? Do you get a picture of his/her lifestyle? Needs? Point is that language matters, not just word, but tone. And these simple sentences can be the hardest, but once you’ve cracked them, you’ve cracked your point of differentiation; where you add value that no one else does and why that’s important. It’s the essence of your fundraising story.
Prioritise! You only have so much time. A prospect list of 5000 is great, but how likely are all those people to give, and how much time do you have to do the asking and steward their gifts? Chances for short AND long term success depend on considering these points from the beginning. Here’s how to think through your next steps.
Make a list - what are you going to do next? Or, if have run out of time reflect. Major point being, it’s cyclical. Emphasize stewardship, emphasize learnings and how that feeds back in to the next campaign to make it stronger. A good exercise to get board and committee members on side too!