Do you want to identify your potential donors interests, their needs and their expectations, structure and overall maintain the relationship with them?
Do you want to involve volunteers and build a win-to-win relationship with them?
Do you want consider building a community of potential donors from scratch?
An organisation, a project of any nature is part of an ecosystem of key relationships that create value to it. It is important that you learn to analyse your organisation business model and also your fundraising project through an holistic approach that takes into consideration the complexity of all the different aspects. For instance, the Business Model of an organisation necessarily involves an ecosystem of actors of various typologies and connected to the organisation in different ways. By definition a Stakeholder is someone who has an interest, in terms of value, in a given cause/project and also in a given organisation.
> For example: La Gattara is an Italian Association whose aim is the recovery and the protection of CATS
A stakeholder is a person, group or organisation that has an interest in your organisation. Stakeholders, therefore, have needs and expectations and can be internal or external to your organisation.
The Ecosystem of stakeholders that characterizes a non profit entity is very complex and, therefore, requires fine grained analysis. Stakeholders can be direct or intermediary. Direct stakeholders are directly connected to your organisation. For example, funders and beneficiaries.
Intermediary stakeholders are those who represent others; they may still have an interest in you but it will be different than a direct stakeholder. For example, the parents of children, where children are the direct stakeholder. Stakeholders therefore include customers (beneficiaries), staff/employes, suppliers, communities, media and governments.
Different stakeholders have different:
A special group of stakeholders are your Key Partners. “Partners means companies and other organizations, yes – but most importantly, it means humans who believe in your work and are committed to helping you do it. (source: The Tech Non Profit Playbook)
Key Partners are crucial for the developement and the success of any innovation process including economic innovation and fundraising.
The Fundraising process involves a rose of stakeholders some of which can surely be defined as Key Partners:
“Fundraising is a numbers game. You gotta knock on enough doors, because you don’t know which door is going to open.”
It takes work and a lot of tries to find the funding relationships that are successful.
Nonprofit fundraising is sales. You need to find a buyer who needs the thing you’re trying to sell. The best fundraisers understand that
As a first STEP, you need to Identify the various external and internal stakeholders, which form the ecosystem of your organisation, including the Volunteers and the Donors. This activity can be done done by brainstorming and through some easy to use Tools, like for instance a FlowChart.
1. Flowchart scheme
A) put your organization in the center, and all the stakeholders around your organization.
B) Connect the stakeholder to the organisation using Arrows
C) It’s better to put them into logical order if possible. For example: put the suppliers on the left side and customers on the right side. Put employer of authorities on top, and make inside stakeholders stay together.
“Stakeholder Analysis (SA) is a technology for investigating the internal and external environment of an organization, while stakeholder map is the visualized presentation for stakeholder analysis”
A lot of information can be added to the stakeholder map concerning the IDENTIKIT of the single stakeholders.
For instance:
You can classify the stakeholders according to different criteria and parameters, and you can custom these parameters according to the needs and the requirements of your organisation and your project.
Common classification criteria are based on their being active, neutral or passive according to their attitudes and standpoints.
In order to analyze the stakeholders’ requirements and expectations you can either:
After you get the requirements and expectations, abstract the important points and put them on top of the arrows.
Mark the stakeholders with different colors according to their standpoints. For example, green represents active, yellow represents neutral, red represents passive.
Keep in mind that:
In a project implementation purpose, an SA can be used to identify potential project partners and supporters. It also provides information on possible risks to the project’s success. Furthermore, the SA may lead to mapping all those stakeholders that need to be informed about the project, and those that can evaluate the results/impact of that project.
2. 1 IDENTIFY KEY PARTNERS
Key PARTNERS are an essential type of stakeholders. In order to identify your key partners you can brainstorm on the following questions
What types of organizations share similar goals and can help you realize this vision? Think about your value add; what types of organizations would benefit from partnering with you in your work? Who already partners with (and in some cases, funds) organizations like yours?
2. 2 MAKE THE DONORS’ IDENTIKIT
You can use the Persona Model to do the Identikit of your donor(s).
The Persona Model is commonly used for profiling the Consumers. However, it is extremely useful also for the analysis of the Stakeholders and in particularly of the donors, especially if they are Individuals.
Building relationships with stakeholder, engagement, is the main focus. The intent is to keep the stakeholders updated so that they can identify more reasons and ways to become involved. Social media is now one of the most used means and one of the most important elements when engaging with the audience is enticing them to respond to your posts! You can accomplish this by appealing through engaging posts, messages, or tweets about the goal, mission, or nature of your fundraising campaign.
Other methods of engagement include:
A very important process (and prerequisite for STEP 6) is to track the relationship that you have with the single donors. We report here a very interesting article on the topic, within a very useful website.
TOP TIPS (source: DonorDock):
Protect the relationship information with your donors – By communicating with your donors, and tracking these interactions, you can build organizational knowledge about each individual donor.
Understand your donor’s preferences– Active communication with your donors and effective tracking helps you understand more about who they are, why they care about your organization, how they prefer to be communicated with, how they prefer to give and limitless other important pieces of informat
Dodge embarrassing communication gaffes – Effective tracking of donor interactions ensures you appear coordinated and presents a unified front to your donors. The 360-degree view of engagement ensures you avoid any gaps in communication with your donors.
Ensure regular and effective communication– As the old saying goes, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” This holds true for donor engagement as well.
Keep your donors and your key actors engaged is winning strategy. Volunteers have a crucial role in fundraising campaign and this is well known. Keeping them engaged is the result of a good management.
We selected useful guidelines for you.
# Matching the Need of the Donors!
A good place to start is with a donor or funder who has a problem themselves that your organization is uniquely positioned to solve.
For example, let’s say your organization has thousands of global digital volunteer opportunities. That’s an opportunity you can “sell.” In this case, it would be wise to focus your fundraising efforts on corporations with a global workforce eager for employee engagement opportunities. Or say your tech nonprofit works in a public system like juvenile court, focusing your fundraising efforts on foundations that have a track record of funding technology in justice court systems is a smart path to pursue. (Source: The Tech Non Profit Handbook)
# Building the Community of your Stakeholders
Creating a Community of Stakeholders through the Social Networks.