10 foundations, 3 years, 20 million pounds

Do you like a challenge?

At the beginning of January 2002, 10 UK community foundations were challenged to raise 2,000,000 GBP each for their trust funds within three years. The foundations were given 100,000 GBP in core support to help them do so. By December 2004, at the close of the project, they had raised 19.5 million GBP.

The project was run by the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation. Findings are given in detail here [link]. I think the report is good, even though it focuses on community foundations and is now four years old, because a lot of the lessons learned about trust fundraising are generally applicable - other organisations can adapt these lessons to their own situation.

At the very least, it’s a good guide to the basics of successful trust fundraising. And it is useful to see how the different internal and external circumstances of the foundations influenced their response to the challenge.

Here are three basic fundraising lessons drawn from the process (you might recognise them…).

1. Make sure that your request for money is not perceived as charity by the potential donor. At this level, donors aren’t responding as much to an immediate need as they are to their desire to support your organisation in perpetuity. You therefore need to prove to them that you are good value for money: that you are able to invest their donation wisely, and that the accrued interest will be well-used.

2. Personal meetings and a flexible approach win all the prizes. If you want a large amount of money from one person’s pocket, you aren’t playing the same numbers game as you would with public appeals. So you need to make sure that you know what your potential donor wants, and that what you are telling them will appeal.

The report finds that talking about financial aspects of a trust is a good strategy with high donors - and this would fail totally in a broad-based public appeal.

3. Develop your organisation. Fundraising has three pillars: there are the projects, the grants… and the bit many organisations forget, which is organisational capacity. It costs effort and money to raise money - and it costs effort and money to administer money.

Organisations which carefully build themselves as fundraising units, by (for example) changing job descriptions and integrating Board members more tightly into the organisation, not only raise more money - they expose themselves to less risk having raised it. Many an NGO has been destroyed by a sudden fundraising success, simply because they weren’t able to manage the money.

There were other lessons too, around

• marketing
• drivers of trust fundraising growth
• asset transfers
• approaches to companies
• and a bunch of other stuff

Download the report to find out more…