You can use these questions and activities to help you structure your thinking and draft your strategy. These steps should help you identify what you need to raise, how long you have to do it, and some of the main opportunities to go about it – and now you have a fundraising strategy!
1️⃣ What do you want to achieve and how much money do you need?
A good way to do this is to get everyone together who is responsible for the group and get them to write their priorities on post-it notes. You can then group and discuss these priorities to identify what the key goals (or most pressing issues to solve) are. Doing this provides an opportunity to articulate why the goals you are focusing on are the right ones – for example, focusing on renovating your building is important because that will allow you to do more activities that will raise money in different ways, or support your groups in improved ways. This is useful because as soon as you start fundraising, you are going to need to convince people of the value of your activity! Once you have your priority – or top three priorities – you can then discuss how much money each one needs.
A good way to do this is to use post-it notes (again!) to list out all the costs involved and discuss them as you go, then add up the total when you have a list of agreed costs. Once you have this, you should also think about any money you do already have secured towards your goal.
For example, you might need to raise $250,000 to renovate your building so you can do more and better activities. You might already have $50,000 put aside for this from a campaign or event you did last year – so your funding gap (or target) is $200,000. Through this discussion process you will hopefully gain a clear sense of your goal and the funding needed to achieve it.
2️⃣ Where are you already doing and what experience do you have?
This is a mapping exercise, again best done by a group with flip chart paper and post-it nots. Make two flip chart sheets: one to capture any fundraising you already do, and one to capture things that have worked in the past. This can be useful, as even in a close team of colleagues, people may not be aware of everything that is happening, or can assume one activity is more profitable than it actually is.
Also, if the answer is that you are currently doing no fundraising at all, that is ok! But again, it is good to be clear with everyone that that is your starting point, as this helps inform expectations and realistic plans.
It is also useful to look at past success and work out if it could be practical to bring it back. Building on previous success is always easier than starting from scratch, so this exercise might give you some starting ideas of things you could try again, or change slightly. You might identify things that could work again in the future even if they are not possible in the short term.
3️⃣ What have you got to work with?
You can use a SWOT (strengths, weakness, opportunity and threat) chart to map out your strengths and opportunities. For a fundraising strategy, weakness and threats only matter if they undermine your strengths or opportunities – it is important to consider them, but only after you have thoroughly mapped the strengths and opportunities as this is where your fundraising ideas and priorities will come from.
This exercise gives you a clear starting point to brainstorm ideas and assess which ones are the best. You can do this through discussion, or if helpful use an options assessment grid to score different approaches.