Most board members join nonprofits knowing that they will be asked to get or give a certain amount of money. Executive directors handle resolving these expectations in different ways – some let the board decide for themselves how much they are individually responsible for, others lay the cards on the table. However you cross that hurdle, do it. Having a board network on your behalf is one of the best ways to build solid individual contributions as well as long-standing supporters. In general, board asks should be at a higher level than you would expect from your average audience member contribution. You need to make it painless for them.
IMPORTANT NOTE! Very few board members want to be only sources of donations. The more valued your board feels for their input on other aspects of your organization, the more likely they are to make an important ask or cut their own check. While members won’t usually want to be embroiled in the minutia of your operations, they will want to see that their fiduciary responsibilities are taken seriously.
Involving Your Board in the Grant Development Process
Resources
"Board v. Staff Roles in Fundraising"
-- Checklist and get/give form (.pdf)
Click here for an article on getting your board members involved.
Resource:
“Develop Your Fund-Raising Plan With Consensus”
Step-by-step guidance to develop your own development plan, and examples of plans to assist in your plan development.
Donor Relations
Building a financially generous and loyal base of individuals is essential for most nonprofit arts organizations. Not only will this group become a major income source, it will also provide opportunities for expanding your audience. In other words, most happy donors will also be happy audience members and will invite friends to become happy donors and audience members, and so on. So your relationship with individual donors has to be about more than just money and meeting your revenue goals. You have to excite them about your programming, offer them ways to become part of your inner circle and ways for them to bring in their friends and colleagues.
The range of contributions from individuals can be vast – from contributors who give little over the ticket price to major donors with deep pockets. One key strategy to remaining financially viable is to diversify your contribution sources optimally so that if one or two individuals drop out each year it won’t be disastrous. On the other hand, you don’t want time-consuming processes for handling a ton of small contributions so that all your income is eaten up by contribution maintenance.
In fundraising, you don’t usually get what you don’t ask for. A lot of beginning nonprofits, often founded by artists, find it hard to solicit individuals for support. If that’s you, remind yourself that if your work’s good enough for your sacrifice, it’s worth the support of others. Your passion can capture people’s imaginations, you need only share it. The trick is to find the right language, focus, and means.
First prepare. Make sure you are ready to manage key information about your potential donors. Be ready to keep accurate, thorough records of each contribution and every contributor. Buy or create a database or filing system that lets you know how much and how often someone gives, what shows they attend, where they live, where they work, what other organizations they help and who they know. Many fundraising software programs are costly, so you may want start with a simple spreadsheet, and use the Foundation Center's Prospect Worksheet as a guide. And always (always!) keep track of your correspondence and contributions. The fastest way to lose a donor is to solicit him for a contribution he already promised on a previous call. Or to not return her call that is asking who to make a check to.
Now that you’re set, let’s start with the easiest prospect – your current audience
First look to your current audience.
These guys are already contributing! They like what you do. Now it’s just a question of letting them take more ownership of your success.
Resources
Resources:
The following downloads are helpful resources to help you start designing your individual donor practices.
Caveat emptor: Do not violate or abuse any applicable cold-call laws.
There are two ways to make cold calls. First, there’s the shotgun approach: If you have a ton of outreach money or a ton of volunteers, you can buy a huge list of names and start calling or emailing away. You already know that a three-percent conversion rate is worthwhile. You’re not afraid of having mass emails junked as spam before they even reach their targets. This, however, is not likely to be you. You have little time, little resources, and little patience. Your calls need to be to select individuals with some known disposition to your mission or your community. These should be prospects capable of larger contributions. You need to be a marksman.
Some Basics
Think of grant development as a more formalized fundraising process. You are still making an ask, but most often the contributor will tell you how and for what to ask.
Grants can come from giving foundations, corporations with giving programs (or sometimes called community relations departments), and government entities. Giving foundations range from small family foundations with very little guidance and possibly no interest in unsolicited proposals to community trusts that consolidate and distribute resources.
The field for grants is competitive and always adapting to the environment. Some foundations change their areas of focus every few years, or sometimes when there’s a turnover of executive staff. You need to keep current on grant guidelines – what might have excluded you last year may not pertain this year.
Restricted/Program Grants vs. Unrestricted/General Operating Grants
Grants you receive will fall into one of these two categories. Be sure you understand which you are requesting or have received.
Carefully read all grant guidelines and requirements before applying and after receiving support.
Prepping Your Organization
Most literature on grant seeking starts smack in the middle of the ABCs of Grant Development – at the point where you’re hunting down those generous foundations and are about to assemble a brilliant proposal. Be careful: A lot of nonprofits, even the big sophisticated ones, have suffered the curse of getting what they ask for – a big juicy grant that, because of a few extra promises in the proposal, has now whipped the nonprofit into new and unexpected directions. The tail has wagged the dog. This dilemma can disrupt the whole organization and drain resources in an attempt to meet unrealistic objectives. Imagine, in the business world, Ford Motor Company re-dedicating a whole factory to film-making. It doesn’t matter that the film will be on car assembly; the crew simply doesn’t have the proper skills (even if they have the proper knowledge), and actual manufacturing comes to a devastating halt. Once the project is over, the factory will probably close. So…
Affirm your organizational objectives, capabilities, and relevance
If you have to, re-visit your mission and review your objectives. Make sure that you have a clear understanding of what you need resources for and what your opportunities and threats are. Do a SWOT analysis of your organization. Make a three-year plan. (Some foundations actually give grants to help with strategic planning. The Chicago Community Trust, for instance, has MOD grants for such purposes.)
When you are solid on who you are as an organization and where you’d like to be in the future, you should start to:
Build proposal boilerplates
It’s not enough only to have a clear idea of what you do. You have to be able to articulate it. You have to make sure that you can compel your potential funders with a good, strong story about your work. Because grants are not a sure thing, you should become adept at pulling together proposal pieces for several foundations at a time. Making boilerplates, or a library, of the basic components of proposals that can be tweaked is a good way to save time and be prepared for deadlines that sneak up on you. Make sure you can show that:
Your mission is indispensable – without your organization or project the world would be a poorer planet. In order to back this assertion you will need to connect it to the real world: your community or "audience." Therefore, you excel at describing:
Almost all funders worth their salt will ask you to touch on most or all of these aspects of your organization. And remember: If you start fudging this information on proposals to fit grant guidelines, it is likely to come back to haunt you. You will either be rejected or, worse, accepted and fail miserably to meet your proposed milestones.
Make supporting materials accessible
There are a number of written documents that many funders require beyond the proposal itself. These include financial and non-financial documents. It is helpful to establish a file with duplicate copies of each of these so that they can be easily accessed during the preparation process.
Non-Financial Documents
Financial Documents
Check the "competition"
Just from experience, you probably already know who else is doing what you want to do. These organizations may not really be competitors – in the nonprofit world everyone is supposed to play nice. Many foundations will ask you how you differentiate yourself from your peers and also how you collaborate with them. Try to articulate why they can’t do what you can and how you all get along. For instance, are you unique because:
On the other hand, you are grateful for your “coopetition” because they are:
After hammering out these broadly requested descriptions, you will be ready to be a master rainmaker! Now it’s time to find the funder!
Most major funders are savvy in what "social revenue" their investments will accrue and they have developed guidelines that reveal their fields of interest and their criteria for giving. Although the individual board members of foundations can sometimes promote a personal project for personal reasons, if you do not have a natural individual contact with a foundation your time is better spent matching your mission and objectives to those revealed in the foundation’s literature and giving history. (These rules are often lost on small family foundations, which may be managed by a single relative or an investment manager who may disperse funds based on personal contacts. Such small foundations often do not have guidelines and can be assessed by a phone call to the primary contact, if one is found.)
Throw Out the Broad Net
When you have a well-defined mission, objectives and strategies, certain words or phrases will repeat themselves and define the areas of potential interest to funders. Using these areas to guide foundation searches will help you build a population of potential funders. The resources below will provide a wealth of information on thousands of foundations. Similar to tracking individual donors, as you come across good prospects, you should write down essential information for quick reference.
Donors Forum of Chicago
is an excellent local resource for researching funders. Most online resources are restricted to members; however, the Forum library is open to the public Mon-Fri noon – 5pm at:
Donors Forum of Chicago
208 South LaSalle Street, Suite 735
Chicago, IL 60604
(312) 578-0175
Guidestar
provides impressive online search capabilities that will bring up various documents and information about funders. Using Guidestar’s search engine requires you to join as a member. Different levels of membership – from free basic to premium – provide different levels of search capabilities and documents.
Foundation Center
also provides online search capabilities and five subscription plans, the lowest is about $20 a month.
The 990
If you have never heard of a 990, you soon will. It is officially called the “Return of Organization Exempt From Income Tax,” which is submitted annually to the IRS by all tax exempt organizations. These forms are required by law to be made publicly available. Both Guidestar and Foundation Center provide databases of 990s. These forms will provide you an official account of the financial size of a foundation, who its highest-paid staff and its board of directors are, and to whom the foundation has given grants to during the year of report.
Resources
The Foundation Center's Prospect Worksheet (.doc) will help you organize your research information.
What to Look for: The Foundation Prospect Worksheet will alert you to what to look for as you review the research material.
The Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York shows where to find information on different sections of a 990 (it does not show that the 990 asks for a listing of grants, which is typically attached).
The fit
As you sift through your foundation searches, you will begin to notice that there are key pieces of information that can help you decide whether a grantor is a good fit. Most search resources provide summaries of grantors that will help you answer some of these essential questions:
Can you talk directly to a funder?
Ironically, one of the resources that emerging arts organizations utilize the least in determining whether a funder is a good fit is the funder itself. After searching a foundation’s web pages and 990s, and deciding that you’ve found a pretty good prospect, a call to one of its program officers (or the executive director if it is a small foundation) can be one of your most time-saving steps. Don’t be afraid to make the call! Most larger foundations will not mind answering your questions, as long as you already have a good idea of what you want funded. (If they do mind, you will find out soon enough with no harm done.) It is part of a program officer’s job to be liaison between a prospective grantee and the foundation’s decision-making body. Most officers are open to well-directed conversations, to listening to a couple project ideas and letting you know which one might be a better fit, or how to actually focus a proposal on certain points to be more attractive for a particular grant. Talking to a foundation can also reveal changes in guidelines that aren’t always obvious in written materials.
Writing Your Proposal
Before you write a proposal be sure that you have found all the format requirements provided by the foundation, which may include page limits and order of proposal subjects. The information you developed in the section on Prepping Your Organization should be easily adaptable to most proposal requirements. While it is not a good idea to do a wholesale restructuring of your ideal project to fit the areas of interest for a grant, you should remember who your audience is and highlight those parts of your project that would make it compelling to the foundation’s review committee. To help you build your proposal, you may want to try the Logic Model system as described in the W. K. Kellogg Foundation guide (.pdf).
Whenever possible be factual about the issues your organization addresses, in its target population and in the opportunities and barriers to serving that population. Providing a solid case for your project is the best way to appeal to the emotional side of a grant maker – anecdotes should be kept short and should not dominate your narrative. Be concise about your proposed activities.
Above all, make sure your proposal is true to your mission and your capabilities. Few funders expect to underwrite an entire project and look for you to provide evidence of efforts to raise additional support. If you have not yet gathered other funders for support, it is legitimate to list those that have received proposals as ‘prospective’ funders. Never list funders as supporters when they have not yet confirmed support!
A sponsorship is not a gift; it is a business transaction, and you have a place at the negotiating table. A sponsorship relationship must be nurtured and maintained correctly to maximize the benefit to a nonprofit arts organization. Make sure you’re ready to solicit and maintain a lasting sponsorship relationship.
Cultural Consumers and Corporate Sponsorships
Corporate sponsors are not only interested in the numbers of audience members you can bring to a sponsored event, but also in the authenticity your art can bring to their brand. Their is a growing recognition among marketers in the idea of the cultural consumer - someone motivated by much more then just brand awareness, flashy advertising and limited choices. They have the power to seek what they need and they don't like being told what, where and when to buy. Marketers are now seeing the value at tapping into the cultural landscape - the landscape you are helping to create - and finding ways to partner with cultural orginizations for mutually beneficial relationships.
Links
The Donors Forum in Chicago is a great resource for finding the latest information on corporate giving, including sponsorships.
Donors Forum - Sponsorship
Resources