CASE 1

I AM DONOR RELIANT

Securing your existing relationships

Building trust with your existing donors is important, which is helped by the efficient delivery of existing projects, transparent and consistent financial and administrative practices, and a clear and regular articulation of your impact. Your internal systems need to facilitate this.

Exploring new donors

There can be a very slow lead-up time to securing new donors. There is a tendency to prefer trusted organisations, with existing relationships. This does often mean that approaching “cold” through an Open Call for Proposals will not necessarily have a high rate of return. There are a couple of ways of making this easier, like leveraging your existing networks (see Tip A) or approaching new funders in partnership with organisations that they already fund and trust

Diversifying to new revenue streams

There are a lot of different ways to diversify – either by diversifying the source of funding or diversifying your revenue streams. It depends on what your innate skill sets are, and what kind of market there is. The thing to always weigh up is how much a new revenue stream potentially deviates you from your existing impact strategy. Finding those revenue streams which support your vision of change and impact is ideal – potentially through, for instance, paid for training (which help builds your capacity for non-paid-for training with beneficiaries), or revenue streams like subscriptions for existing technology products you have.

Capacitate for your funding strategy

Your human capacity shouldn’t simply be focused on capacity for existing work, but also the capacity needed for your ultimate funding strategy. You need the personnel that can help meet your financial goals.

A: Know Your Network

While we will show there are several factors to consider when deciding what funds to pursue and how to structure your organisation, an important strategic consideration is your own (and your organisation's own) existing social and professional network. Accessing funding is a very social exercise in the sense thatinteraction and trust matter (even when it's suggested that they don't). Thinking about how to first use your own networks better (where trust has already been established) can give you the space to then think about how to diversify your network for the organisation as a later step.

B: Reimagine Yourself

While you need a clear sense of who you are as an organisation and what you are good at to ensure your broader success, it is also an important exercise to try and reimagine yourself, even if for pure speculation. If you are a non-profit, what would a for-profit version of your organisation look like? If you are a for profit, what would it look like to access charitable funds?

C: Knowledge Is Power

Use your networks and communities to learn more about specific types of clients that exist within your environment. The world of financing and funding is imbued with many open secrets i.e., specific clientsand entities that have a long history of consistent practices that may be risky or may offer opportunities. Do your own due diligence - this is an important empowering act for an organisation in disrupting thetypical giver-receiver dynamic.

F: Budget for the Future

Sustainability needs to be in your budget line items. Particularly given the challenges to the types of funds available and limitations to the use of those funds, you should specifically allocate line items that can foster your sustainability. For-profit entities do this through the accumulation of profit, and non-profits should do this through the accumulation of surpluses that gets allocated against future expenditure.These line items should be included across funding and financing proposals and offer security against volatility in the funding and finance environment. It also better enables you to sustain organisationaldevelopment, like employing as opposed to contracting capacity and talent.