One client is a crisis pregnancy project, with low overheads, but difficult and emotive to fund.
The second is a community project with a number of strands to its work, that has grown enormously over the last 18 months - and is now hitting the twin difficulties of funding staff costs, and covering ongoing expenditure.
Funders like new projects, and generally are not so keen to fund people. Local authority commissioning is increasingly difficult to access and tends to favour larger players.
So two funding strategies later, each project has a plan in place to cover 5 areas:
- Reducing costs
- Increasing income
- Developing tradable services and products
- Considering mergers with more financially stable partners
- Winding down and closing the project
Within the increasing income section of each strategy we have sourced potential sources of grants - but also proposed development of mixed funding streams, for example through donor development, events, on-line funding, outreach volunteers. Council contracts are referenced but are increasingly out of the picture. Philanthropy is emerging as a new strand of funding, and there are at least two organisations we are approaching who provide a framework for connecting projects with potential donors through a Dragon's Den style pitching opportunity.
The next step is to support and coach people within each of the two projects to implement the strategy.
If you are interested in developing or reviewing your funding strategy - then please get in touch.
No comments:
Post a Comment