I've always felt that its really easy to get turned off from writing a fundraising strategy. Just the phrase can make one shudder!
But actually it really isn't that complicated, and believe it or not it can become quite an interesting and fun opportunity to bring people together in shared purpose offering an opportunity to motivate and challenge your charity team. By following a process, creating a fundraising strategy can really help to create clarity around a whole series of organisational issues that might need to be addressed, and can help tie alot of activities together, not only in terms of fundraising, but business planning and marketing too.
Having spoken to alot a people about what a fundraising strategy should be, and why its so important, its very clear that for a charity to be really successful with fundraising, it needs to make it a central focus within the charities activity. As one colleague said- "we need to become fundraising charities" not charities that fundraise. Without one, you cannot have the other, and we need to move away from the idea that tends to pervade within smaller charities, that 'money' is a dirty word. Well that it may be, but the harsh reality is that without we become limited in fulfilling our charities mission. We become stressed by lack of resources which inhibits us from developing or acting on new opportunities, we waste time in a perpetual cycle of crisis fundraising management, and become constrained by a deficit mindset.
So that is just a bit of background to why I feel so strongly that a fundraising strategy can be the backbone of a sustainable fundraising future, and is the opprtunity to galvanise energy, passion and enthusiasm and channel iit nto an active and inspiring plan to guide your charity to financial freedom and abudance!
By thinking more ambitiously and abundantly we can start to free ourselves of traditional small charity 'shackled' thinking and start to be braver and more ambitious in the way we fundraise.
So with that in mind, I have created a webinar, '5 Steps to creating a Fundraising Strategy' to help you get started- its a simple structure you can use to kick start your fundraising strategy. Of course if you would like to access support to bring your strategy to life and be guided through the process, I am now accepting students on to my 'Fundraising Formula' course, which aims to guide you through the creation of your strategy over 6 weeks, whilst you learn about new fundraising ideas and approaches to help you unlock more diverse, sustainable fundraising income streams.
Sign up for the Fundraising Formula Course
