Tag Archive for: communicate with donors

Keeping in Touch with Your Foundation Donors

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Teri BlandonBy Teri S. Blandon, GPC, CFRE; Vice President for External Relations, PAI

The 2016 election caused massive disruptions to many people, personally and professionally. As I work for a women’s reproductive rights advocacy organization, the election results caused us to pivot quickly. Immediately, we had to pull back our annual appeal letter (which was at the printer) and completely rewrite it to reflect the new reality. On an organizational level, we have had to significantly revise our 2017 program plan, which will impact our upcoming foundation proposals and reports.

The election may have caused similar disruptions in your nonprofits. While there are a lot of unknowns about what the future brings, there are concrete things you can and should be doing to maintain positive relationships with your institutional donors.

  • Talk with the community you serve. The campaigns were extraordinarily acrimonious, and stirred up a lot of negative feelings and uncovered deep schisms in our country at many levels. How has this played out in your community (however you define “community”)? Whether you operate locally, state-wide, nationally or internationally, no one has been left unaffected by the campaigns and election. Your nonprofit is on the frontline — what are you learning about the people you serve that could be useful to your funders?
  • Check in with your program colleagues. What worries the program experts about the incoming Congress and Administration? How are your programs and community likely to be affected by policies at the state and national levels? Perhaps there was some good news in your state elections — for example, some jurisdictions increased the minimum wage which will positively impact many of the groups we serve. Make sure you are aware of any discussions going on about how your nonprofit may have to change or adapt your programming in the coming months.
  • Talk to your foundation donors. Almost all of our foundations are now talking internally about how their strategy will shift in light of the Trump-Pence administration. While these discussions will likely take some time, you have a golden opportunity to position your organization as a provider of important and useful intelligence. Thinking back to my first bullet point — what do you know about how the community is feeling/reacting? What is happening within your community to address the issues churned up by the election? And pulling in the information referenced in my second bullet point — what is your nonprofit doing about it? In the case of my organization, we were able to pull together an analysis of the probable funding cuts and policy changes that will happen after the inauguration, and distributed it to our top funders. (The best part is that this was the idea of our Programs staff!) We intend to keep them updated as new information becomes available. We received several emails in response expressing how much the program officers appreciated the information. This wasn’t about asking for money (that will come later); it was about making sure our funders had accurate and timely information they can use when discussing their own strategy.

You are not powerless — you have important information about how upcoming policies and funding decisions affect real people. Use it to advocate for the people you serve by sharing it with your donors. It will position your organization as a provider of services and intelligence.

How 100 Years Sparked a Giving Platform that Connected Donor’s Passions with Changed Lives

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By Becky Jascoviak, MBA – GPF Board Member and Grant Writer at Kids Alive International

 

Kids Alive International, the organization I am blessed to serve, is celebrating 100 years of ministry this year. It’s an incredible milestone that very few companies reach, let alone non-profit organizations. What do 100 years look like? In 1916…

  • The Eiffel Tower was the tallest building in the world.
  • Crossword puzzles hadn’t been invented yet.
  • Only 23% of the world could read and write.
  • Average life expectancy was only 48.

 

At Kids Alive, 100 years look like this: what started as two little orphans taken in by a missionary couple in China in 1916, has now become nearly 7,000 children in 15 countries worldwide. We provide loving homes and promising futures to children who have no hope, a family for one who has been abandoned, an education for one whose father only made it through 2nd grade, a supplemental reading program for a refugee child who has been out of school for three years, and above all, love.

 

It’s why I do what I do: connecting people of passion to the people and projects that will light their fire for a change in the world; connecting donors and dollars to desperate, displaced people. And for 100 years, Kids Alive has faithfully provided people the opportunity to connect with abandoned and abused children through a variety of giving programs including individual child sponsors, service team building labor, and project and program proposals for major donors.

 

As the 100th Anniversary approached, we sought to create a donor program devised to spur the ministry on to the next century – a future-focused appeal, rather than simply a celebration of the past. A three-year plan called the Next Century Initiative was established along with a new fund called the Independence Fund. These two programs, in tandem, provide a way for donors to help build the facilities and infrastructure needed to care for more kids, as well as provide a pool of funds to provide for ongoing needs of our students as they grow into adulthood.

 

Within the Next Century Initiative, there are tangible building projects such as schools, care centers, and residential homes, within each of our countries. Also, there are programmatic funding opportunities such as education, training, and discipleship. This balance allows us to speak directly to the passions and desires of each donor. A vast majority of our donors give to site-specific programs and projects. Perhaps they sponsor a child in the Dominican Republic; they are also inclined to want to make sure that the student has a classroom conducive to learning.

 

We started in 2013 gearing up for 2016 with a quiet phase of donor cultivation and specific major donor proposals. Designed as a three-year giving plan, this program garnered a substantial foundation on which to build the public phase, including extra or special one-time grant giving, matching campaigns, and some fully funded projects. We then expanded to our mid-level donors and a broader reach of grant funding positioned in support of sustaining the ministry long-term. These two phases together have yielded over half of the $6 million we hoped to secure through the Next Century Initiative.

 

It is 2016, and we are off to the races with our celebration events around the country – the truly public phase of bringing the field here to the donors. We’re hosting large presentations and small intimate donor circles, we’re presenting at conferences, and donors are going out of their way to connect with their passions through special gifts.

 

How will you celebrate your next milestone?

 

Learning by doing

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Hélène Pereira da Silva

Senior Fundraiser, MS International Federation, Certified by the UK Institute of Fundraising

helene@msif.org

April, 2015

A French and Brazilian fundraiser currently based in London, I’m a proud part of the MS International Federation team. We’re the only global network of nonprofits working to change the face of multiple sclerosis for people affected by this debilitating disease, wherever they live. www.msif.org

I looked through the window this morning and the Surrey Quays marina greeted me with its colourful inhabited boats and sleek all-white pleasure yachts. A familiar sight that reminds me every day of why I love my life in London. As I put some bread to toast I thought of the article I said I’d write for the GPA blog and felt myself slowly drifting back to my first months in the city a good five years ago, when a career in fundraising had started to look like a real possibility.

Having always enjoyed writing, grants fundraising seemed a good enough choice for someone with a multitude of short-lived experiences ranging from advocacy internships in Rio de Janeiro to Portuguese private lessons in the South of France and waiting tables in Soho, London. The best of the bunch had been a four-month fundraising internship with a small French nonprofit working with street children in Kolkata, India.

Following a few unsuccessful interviews I felt insanely grateful to be given an opportunity as a fundraising volunteer at Groundwork London. There my research and writing helped fund environmental projects involving communities in need. Two months later I was happily joining Breast Cancer Care, a UK-wide nonprofit providing information and support for people affected by breast cancer across the country.

In my time with Breast Cancer Care I learned to navigate a captivating new world populated by service delivery teams, finance managers and foundation administrators and trustees. It wasn’t long before an opportunity came up to look after a large multiyear grant from the National Lottery Fund –what a learning curve.

The experience taught me to put different hats on so I could not only efficiently communicate with donors about issues like changes of plans and delays in funded service delivery, but also keep an open channel with all the different internal teams involved in the project. Other grants followed and I ended up working with almost the whole organisation, for which I felt extremely lucky. As a foreigner, collaborating closely with teams based in London, Sheffield, Cardiff and Glasgow gave me so many new fascinating cultural insights.

When I joined my current organisation I sensed I was prepared for the challenges of a federation of nonprofits based all around the world. The key for me has been to explore how much more we can achieve together and, most importantly, to do the hard work needed to bring credibility and reality to this vision.

‘None of us is as smart as all of us.’ (Japanese proverb)