School for Social Entrepreneurs - Developing a Fundraising Strategy Day 1

This course is for people who have at least some fundraising experience already, but want to develop a more strategic and sustainable approach. It will equip you with the ability to evaluate and prioritise different fundraising opportunities and ideas, make better use of your limited resources, and more confidently navigate the post-Covid fundraising landscape.

Depending on your current position and experience level, you may prefer to check out our Getting Started With Fundraising or Fundraising from Trusts and Foundations courses instead.

Developing an effective fundraising strategy requires a methodical approach, a sound knowledge of how fundraising works and an honest evaluation of your organisation’s position. We’ll be walking you through a comprehensive process for developing a smarter and more focused strategy, and sharing a number of powerful decision-making techniques.

We’ll start by introducing some vital foundation exercises to do before developing your fundraising strategy. These will help you to articulate why fundraising is necessary, review your current performance and identify how to reach key fundraising audiences. We’ll then show you how to evaluate and prioritise different types of fundraising, and ensure you have the key building blocks in place for long-term fundraising success.

This course is ideal for you if you’re looking to:

• Identify how best to fund and sustain your organisation’s work in a challenging fundraising climate
• Harness the many different ideas from colleagues and trustees / directors into a coherent fundraising strategy
• Ensure everyone within your organisation pulls together on fundraising, and agrees what fundraising success should look like

This course is delivered online. It consists of two online sessions on consecutive days, with time for questions throughout. We’ll be setting you some exercises to work on independently between the two sessions. To get the most from the course, we recommend that you set aside some time for these before the second day.

Day 1 (10:00-12:15 including a break)

• The challenges currently facing fundraising, and the importance of a good fundraising strategy
• Reviewing your current fundraising performance and what needs to change
• Building a clear picture of how different types of fundraising work, and their potential for you
• Articulating the need for fundraising: how much do you need to raise and why?
• Some powerful analytical tools to help you – Enhanced SWOT Analysis & Audience Mapping
• Introducing some exercises to work on before tomorrow

Day 2 (10:00-12:45 with a short break midway)

• Q&A: How can you work with your Board and team to plan for your fundraising strategy?
• Deciding which fundraising activities to do, which to discard, and how to resource your plans
• Developing your central case for support and other materials to support your fundraising
• Creating a whole-organisation fundraising culture
• Forecasting income and setting targets
• Bonus Q&A: How to fundraise successfully after the pandemic?

Book here