I . Basic of fundraising

The fundraising campaign is the process that starts with the identification of the “good cause” to be used to attract donors and ends with the achievement of the donation. In order to make the campaign a dynamic process you will have to gain fidelity of your donors so you will submit them new causes in the future.

In order to design, plan, develop and act a fundraising campaign you have to follow the following steps

The mission of a youth organization is often difficult to communicate and to use as a driving force for a fundraising campaign. Furthermore, the mission is often very complex, not easy and immediate to understand. Let’s not forget that our goal is to convince people and organizations to give us money or other resources: it will be difficult to convince them about vague and unclear content. The good cause must be identified among your core activities, not necessarily the most important that the organization carries out. The good ideal cause has a clear and recognizable goal and a very specific and recognizable target.

An example of a good cause is:contributing to the education of the children of a poor country. Other examples could be: providing a musical culture to children on the outskirts of a large city, providing technological devices to the pupils of a school in a poor neighborhood, alleviating the suffering of children hospitalized for serious illnesses, helping the parents of sick children to assist their children, etc. It is evident that the chosen target must be a social group towards which our potential donors are well disposed: all are sensitive to children, fewer people are sensitive to the elderly or to people with disabilities or to women victims of violence. Far fewer are sensitive to the issues of LGBTQ communities or immigrants. With regard to goals, everyone is sensitive to health, many are sensitive to education, fewer people are sensitive to the need for goods and services. The identification of your good cause, on which to base your fundraising campaign, is a function of the target and objective that make up the good cause and the type of donor we are targeting.

Knowing precisely the amount of economic and in kind resources (volunteers, goods, services, etc.) available for your fundraising campaign is the starting point for structuring the campaign itself. Having a precise measure of the budget available allows us to choose a mix of sustainable activities with that budget (communication, planning on calls, use of communicators, assignments to professionals, etc.). Having knowledge of the in kind resources available in addition to the budget allows us to fill in the Fundraising Model Canvas of our campaign in a complete and effective way and to avoid unpleasant surprises while the campaign is in progress. The identification of available resources is essential for a correct identification of fundraising objectives.

Fundraising objectives are expressed through a sum of money or an amount of resources: the objective of a fundraising campaign can be the achievement, for example, of donations for € 10,000 or the collection of 500 kg of food or clothes or a certain number of hours of voluntary work.

The objectives of a fundraising campaign must be:

• REALISTIC (I cannot set myself the goal of raising € 1,000,000 if for that type of cause or for the resources I can invest or for the type of activity I plan to carry out the average level of donations does not reach € 10,000);
• COMMENSURATE  with the resources that can be invested (if I have the opportunity to invest € 10,000 in communication or € 50,000 in organizing an event with a national or international artist, I will have different results from those I can obtain if I have only some voluntary work or a budget of € 1,000);
• COMMENSURATE with the time available: the more time I have, the easier I will reach greater goals, even if a campaign cannot last too long, otherwise the support communication becomes unsustainable and the message itself fades;
• CLEAR for donors: it can be motivating for the donor to know how much his individual donation contributes to the achievement of the fundraising objective;
• CLEARLY LINKED to the goal of the good cause chosen: for example, if I need € 10,000 to study until graduation from a poor country, I can set myself a fundraising goal of € 100,000 to get 10 students to study.

Once good cause, resources, fundraising objectives and donors have been identified, it is possible to fine-tune the Fundraising Model Canvas of our fundraising campaign. The model can be used both for an entire campaign and for a single fundraising activity and allows us to have an immediate idea of the feasibility of the campaign or the activity itself as well as everything we need to carry it out.

The Fundraising Model Canvas is the tool that allows us to identify the Fundraising Activities Mix that will allow us to maximize the resources available given our donors and our good cause.

The template with the explanations for correct compilation is available at the link indicated below in the “resources” section, to which we refer in full.

Business Models represent the sum total of aligned component processes, assets, and resources needed for a business to compete in its desired industry. As a result the business model for a nonprofit will different from a for-profit. Similarly the business model for a law firm will differ from a retail store. The difference is not just in the components themselves but also the goals, values, and competencies needed to leverage those business components. A fundraising model canvas provides a business model for fundraising organizations, or departments, focused on realizing fundraising related goals.

A generic fundraising model canvas can be developed to guide the marketing, promotional, and stakeholder engagement strategies. This is depicted below.

Similar to many logic or process maps the fundraising model canvas distinguishes between inputs, assets/strategies, outputs, and goals. The fundraising model canvas inputs will vary depending on goals and industry but these common elements remain shared across fundraising platforms. For example – The fundraising model canvas can be further refined to differentiate fundraising focused on domestic services versus those focused on purchasing and donating supplies on the international stage.

The information needed for each domain of the fundraising model canvas is depicted in the completed example below.

Having all of these components included in your organization’s fundraising plan is not enough. They must be aligned and insure the same values, message, and ‘call to action’ is carried throughout. Failing to incorporate any of these components into an organization’s (aligned) fundraising efforts can result in mixed messages, damaged organizational branding and image, and an inadequate ‘call to action.’ Focusing on a common language, colour pallet, logo placement, font, and emphasizing the visibility of the organization’s mission, vision, and values is just the beginning. Planning your fundraiser with the included canvas should bring your organization considerably closer to having all of the pieces necessary to facilitate a successful event.

The Fundraising Model Canvas constitutes a planning of our fundraising campaign. What is missing is the temporal dimension, which can be added through a set of simple and extremely effective tool: the Gantt chart and the PERT chart. The Gantt chart, used mainly in project management activities, is a type of bar chart that illustrates a project schedule. This chart lists the tasks to be performed on the vertical axis, and time intervals on the horizontal axis. The width of the horizontal bars in the graph shows the duration of each activity. Gantt charts illustrate the start and finish dates of the terminal elements and summary elements of a project.

A PERT chart, also known as a PERT diagram, is a tool used to schedule, organize, and map out tasks within a project. PERT stands for program evaluation and review technique. It provides a visual representation of a project’s timeline and breaks down individual tasks. These charts are similar to Gantt charts, but structured differently. A PERT chart works by visually representing a project’s tasks and the dependencies connected to each one. You might use one to create an initial schedule and estimated timeline to share with project stakeholders before the project actually begins.

The next step is a selection work. The selection of donors can be done in various ways:

• for the choice of people to invite to an event, starting from the database elaborated in step 4, we will formally invite all those for whom the four dimensions mentioned above are more evident;
• for public campaigns, the selection will be automatically generated by the communication campaign that will support fundraising;
• for direct requests, the selection necessarily takes place on the basis of the ability of direct contact with the donor himself, on the basis of the territoriality of the good cause and on the basis of the ability of effective lobbying on the donor;
• for institutional donors, the selection takes place from among those who have, at the moment in which the fundraising campaign is to be started, open financing measures compatible with our good cause: the decision on which or which of them to select is very complex, not there is a predefined recipe and it depends on many variables: available resources, possible competition (both from a qualitative and quantitative point of view), presence of more or less warm contacts in the supplying organizations, lobbying capacity, delivery times, adherence to good cause, ability to network, etc.

• One might be tempted not to choose which donors to turn to, enticed by the theoretical possibility of intercepting a greater number. Normally this does not happen, on the contrary, in many cases the opposite happens: think of competing companies or organizations and of social groups that are not compatible with each other.

  More on donors and stakeholders in the next topic.

Once the Fundraising Model Canvas of our campaign has been developed, we will need to approach our potential donors to understand if they are actually willing to donate money or resources when our organization is needed.

As far as institutional donors are concerned, the operation is very simple: on their website and on their other media we will find thematic calls for proposals with a deadline or open calls (open until resources are exhausted) or open procedures to carry out the formal request.

With the other donors present in our database, especially individuals and organizations, however, we cannot ignore direct contact.

To facilitate contact, it may be useful to develop a presentation of our organization and / or our good cause made with Microsoft PowerPoint or similar tools and saved in PDF format so that it can be easily viewed on any computer or smartphone.

The presentation will be sent by e-mail and must be followed by a first telephone contact.

It will be extremely useful to have our potential donor announce our telephone contact by mutual acquaintances or by people known to us.

In addition to the direct approach, to be preferred whenever possible, we will also need to get our message across to people and organizations with whom we have no contact of any kind. This is the case, for example, of the sale of solidarity gadgets or the organization of events. In this case it will be necessary to resort to a communication campaign to support our fundraising campaign. The communication campaign, if the available resources allow it, must be entrusted to professionals in the sector: a saving in this sense inevitably translates into a lower success of the fundraising campaign while a professional communication campaign must be considered as an investment aimed at making a profit. that exceeds the expense.

Once all the activities have been planned and the target donors have been identified, the activities foreseen in the campaign are carried out, which can be:

direct fundraising through street, telephone and social network communicators: difficult activities, for which a large and well-trained staff (voluntary or not) is required;

sale of “solidarity” products or services: what is purchased is in any case the product or service which must, therefore, be of the quality necessary to compete on the market – the “solidarity” character is to be considered a marketing lever that selects automatic donors;

collection of payment of percentages on taxes: in some countries (Italy, etc.) it is possible, in addition to deducting donated money from taxes, also to allocate part of one’s taxes to public and / or private organizations that pursue purposes of public interest. Access to these resources requires on the one hand an important investment in communication, on the other the possibility of lobbying with tax consultants to address the undecided and those who have not already identified recipients;

crowdfunding: a collaborative process of a group of people using their money together to support the efforts of people and organizations. It is a bottom-up microfinance practice that mobilizes people and resources. Today it happens almost exclusively through online platforms which must be registered by submitting a project according to schemes similar to those of funding calls;

events: organization of events (of any type, from dinner to concert, reading, artistic performance, etc.) for a fee or by invitation with the collection that takes place during the event. It is a very expensive activity so it is possible if you have substantial initial resources, both financial and volunteers. Normally the economic return is decidedly positive. The pandemic has severely limited this activity and must be taken into account;

lottery: popular form of gambling based on drawing numbers, with cash prizes. Some countries prohibit lotteries, while others also adopt and regulate them at the national and supranational level. The prize to the winner (or winners) can be in cash or various types of goods. A portion of the proceeds is used to pay the expenses and what remains is the proceeds

direct requests: direct contact with potential donors and direct request for resources for an activity of public interest: it requires lobbying skills, direct contacts and a certain territoriality;

participation in call for proposals and funding calls: it is the fundraising activity that potentially has the best ratio between resources used and revenue obtained. Improvising designers can bring impromptu successes, but if an organization intends to use this fundraising technique in a systematic way it must contact a professional or acquire an internal trained resource, with a high fixed cost and without guarantee of results. In any case, the following provides the minimum information for direct access to this source of funding.

Almost all the calls include:

• filling out an application;
• the development of a project on a form provided by the funding body;
• the preparation of a budget;
• the submission of a set of attached documents;
• a deadline for submitting the application.

Today many applications can only be presented through online platforms whose use is, in some cases, particularly complex. The platforms are many and very different from each other so it is unthinkable, in a tool like this, to describe how they work.

The quality of the work is essential for access to funds also because the competition is numerous and well prepared. A high quality level is achieved both through continuous updating and through experience.

The campaign does not end with the realization of the planned activities: further steps are necessary which can be defined as “post-production”. The first of these is the monitoring of feedback from donors:

•  with regard to direct requests, it will be necessary to follow up on the agreements reached during the interview through the formalization of the same and the necessary steps for collection;
•  sales of products and services, events, tickets, etc. it must be very accurate as there is a risk of not equalizing the outputs, very conspicuous for this type of activity;
•  the results of participation in thematic calls and open calls are in some cases published on the channels of the funding body and the publication constitutes a formal notification so that there is a risk of losing any funding if these channels are not monitored, in other cases a communication is received direct, now only by e-mail, but you have to be careful about antispam.

Once the donations have been obtained, they need to be managed.

The management of free donations is the simplest as it does not require timely reporting of activities and expenses. In this case, the organization will in fact invest the resources obtained in carrying out its ordinary activities which it will report through communication tools such as its website, newsletter, social network accounts, etc. Particular emphasis will be placed on the good cause chosen as the foundation of the fundraising campaign, but univocal correspondence between this and donations is not required. The most conspicuous donations, however, as we have seen, are linked to a specific good cause, usually a project. In this case, the reporting of activities and expenses requested by donors is very timely and also in this case it is necessary to have access to professional skills of a medium-high profile, with the consequent costs.

The donors are our goose that lays the golden eggs and must be pampered. Caring for the relationship with donors includes:

• thank-you letters: normally they are sent to direct donors and have a form of respect (parchments, contents of the activities, gadgets);
• project’s results reporting (see above);
•  events: events offered to donors as a form of thanks.
• The thanks must also be a way to establish contacts with the donor for future donations and must therefore always be connected to other activities to be carried out and used to retain the donor.

The process described is, in reality, a circular process for which the last step is the return to step 1.