When business is small, then the proprietor makes all the expenses of his business. At some points, you need more funds and fundraising strategies to grow and expand your business.

By the end of this article, you will learn:

What is Fundraising Strategy?

A document which gives specific fundraising tasks and strategies, including who will be responsible for completing them and the time frame of when they need to be accomplished

6 Steps to Develop Fundraising Strategies 

1. Identify your assets

2. Develop a case statement

3. Set your goals

4. Create an action plan

5. Evaluate your strategy

We were going to go through six steps to create a fundraising strategy

1) Identify your Assets

When the first steps for us knowing your assets how do we identify your assets

How do we identify you know early on are there any weaknesses about your organization that we need to start paying attention to.

So we’re going to need to find a way to identify your assets, and you know probably speaking here we’re looking at your human resources and your current organizational strengths.

Examples of Assets

• Compelling mission
• Public support· Well-connected staff and board
• High traffic website
• Name recognition

SWOT Analysis

One technique to identify your assets is to use one of these classic strategic planning tools called a SWOT analysis.

SWOT means s stands for strengths W weaknesses O stands for opportunities, and T stands for the thread.

Part of your strategic planning process, doing a SWOT analysis or SWOT matrix at the very beginning, is an excellent way for you to brainstorm as a team.

So when we start to jot down your strengths and weaknesses, these are usually seen as internal driver’s opportunities and threats.

I’d like you to view them as external factors their technological changes happening in the world today that could be an opportunity or a threat to the way you work other social, cultural shifts happening in the world today that might be potential opportunities for your work or threats.

So the SWOT analysis visualizes a piece of paper, turns it into four corners, and labels those corners one corner upper left-hand side you might want to mark as strengths.

It is in the ultimate goal of doing a SWOT analysis is to identify your assets. This is part of a funding strategy process that would take, but you are also using it to figure out your advantages in this sector.

It’s good to know our advantages, but we also want to know where we are weak because we can always improve, so you want to jot down your strengths label another box weaknesses one box won’t be labeled opportunities and one table will be labeled threats.

this is yeah you might have to brainstorm as a team about this, but it shouldn’t take you that long to fill out a SWOT analysis and again our opportunities and threats are

Develop a case statement

2) Develop a Case Statement

It is a document usually viewed as an internal fundraising piece.

This is a memo that you write. It could be four to six pages in length.

Contents in case statement:

• Mission and values
• rograms and services
• Accomplishments
• Plans for future
• Budget needs

It sets forth in you know really clear, concise, and compelling writing. It sets forth all of the reasons why your organization deserves and merits financial support right now and way into the future to develop a useful, persuasive case statement.

 You’ll want to get a sense of who you want to be like ten years from now. You’ve got internal documents that address your mission and the values that your organization holds.

You definitely should have documents describing the programs and services that you are offering the public and their outcome.

3) Set your Goals

It’s time to set realistic annual fundraising goals I mean you know exactly how much money you have in your budget next year to run your organization, and you should know how much it costs to do everything you want to do in your organization.

Start small build your confidence and then your funding history of how much money you’ve raised from which source is going to show you where you should be moving next year.

so the best advice here to set a realistic fundraising goal is to start exactly where you are if you’re not the money person in your organization sit down with somebody who has a much better sense of where the money has been coming from for the last couple of years

So you have to know simply who your current funding partners are?

Who are the largest funding partners?

Where could you strengthen your funding base?

4) Create an Action Plan

This action plan tells me exactly how much money you’re going to raise next year from investors and how you’re going to do it your fundraising plan.

You’re going to set a revenue goal for each of these strategies.

 If you’re going to raise money from corporations and businesses, I’m going to see which months and how much you’re growing from local companies as well as which months and how much you expect to be getting a more substantial amount from a multinational company.

So when you’re doing your action plan when you’re crafting it, you have to create a chart or time table with some kind of description and the person responsible for that activity.

5) Evaluate Your Strategy

We go through the fundraising plans because it’s teamwork together everybody achieves more.

It builds consensus among your team. It helps you prioritize what your fundraising strategies should be in the first place. There is a tremendous amount of communication internally and externally happening with these fundraising plans. You’re going to evaluate it monthly.

At the end of the year, you have to evaluate because you have to decide what worked and what didn’t work. Did we raise more money from investors, and we thought we were going to how did we do it? Did we not secure as much corporate support as we thought?

 We were going to secure what worked, and you know your fundraising success builds, so we already know that we’re putting significant amounts of time into the pitch in the proposal writing process and the follow-up calls.

Some fundraising ways are given below:

1. Loans:

Loans are risky. They are not widely recommended and they luckily for many people harder to get than.

 It would seem because you can get a personal loan possibly if you have good credit, but most people who try to get a lot of investments to end up not having good credit because they spend the money and then they have to pay the thing back right, and then they ruin their credit history.

Most banks don’t loan to companies that have not started.

• Risky, if the business will not succeed you still have to pay back the money with interest
• Bank does not give loans to new companies.
• You can try Lendio.com,Microlending.com and crowd-lending.com for an online loan.

2. Crowdfunding

• Websites that provide loans to the new business.
• Laws are different in all countries.
• Competition is high.

3. Investors: 

The investors invest in the kind of business that you have; of course, after seed investors, there are angel investors.

There’s always a lot of overlap between angel investors and seed investors.

Generally, angel investors are a little bit later in the game. Of course, the top of the pyramid here is venture capital. They typically give large ventures around, so your business has to be pretty established and have pretty high growth.

• Incubators Like YCombinator, TechStars, ERAccelerator, and many others provide funding to the new businesses.
• Seed Investors
• AngelList.com and gust.com
• Angel investors
• VC (Venture capital)

4. Bootstrapping

Bootstrapping, which is not raising money but running your business more practically with a deep, slightly different business strategy, you aren’t going to need a lot of money.

You should have a good business strategy because it’s easier to make that tend to raise money.

 

Conclusion

I explained the ways of raising funds. Again, the six steps developing a fundraising plan identify your assets and look at what’s happening externally.

 That’s the opportunities and threats part of it. What do we need to know about our operating environment next year after next year to identify your assets? This will tell you what your competitive advantage is.

Develop a case statement set realistic fundraising goals for yourself realistic fundraising goals.

That’s the key to creating this action plan, creating a fundraising plan implemented, doing the work get your team involved, and evaluating your plan monthly.

You’re going to assess your project by the end of the year because you’re working on your fundraising plan.

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