Blueprint Fundraising

Happy holidays!

It REALLY feels like winter here in Vancouver where we have had more snow fall over the last week than I’ve seen in all the years I’ve lived here. Perfect for everyone who was dreaming of a white Christmas!

I hope you have a lovely holiday, wherever you are and however you celebrate the season. I really hope you aren’t reading this from an airport, where your flight has been canceled indefinitely and you’ve been eating Subway and Tim Hortons for three days.

This has been another year of wonderful clients for Blueprint. I would like to thank these excellent organizations for allowing us to help them with their fundraising and communications projects. I am deeply inspired and grateful for all you do for the community.

Adoptive Families Association of BC
Alliance for Arts + Culture
Amuse Consulting
Atira Women’s Resource Society
Ballet BC
BC Association for Community Living
BC Compassion Club
BC Federation of Foster Parent Associations
Birmingham & Wood
Bowen Island Municipality
Canadian Cancer Society
Canadian Mental Health Association Vancouver Burnaby
Cherie Smith JCCGV Jewish Book Festival
Chor Leoni Men’s Choir
City of Abbotsford
City of Vancouver YouthPolitik Conference
Crisis Intervention & Suicide Prevention Centre of BC
DanceHouse
David Suzuki Foundation
DOXA Documentary Film Festival
Environmental Youth Alliance
Lundin for Africa
Marguerite Dixon Transition Society
Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House
North Shore Disability Resource Centre
Out On Screen
PLEA Community Services Society of BC
PuSh International Performing Arts Festival
Simon Fraser University Writer’s Studio
St. James Community Service Society
Sunshine Coast Community Services Society
The Banff Community Foundation
The Communications Group
The Salvation Army Chilliwack
The Tyee
Vancity Community Foundation
Vancouver Art Gallery
Vancouver Community College
Vancouver International Writers Festival
Vancouver Museum
WISH Drop-In Centre Society
Yaletown House Foundation

No more snow, please… via Flickr.

New learning opportunities in 2009

Just a quick note to let you know that the next AFP First Course for Metro Vancouver is going to be held on February 16 and 17th. Early bird pricing is available until January 16th.

I’d also like to let you know about a planned giving course taught by Peter Chipman, starting in January at BCIT. Peter is an excellent teacher and very experienced gift planner. His course is open to anyone who has taken BCIT’s Essentials of Fundraising course (FUND 1215).

I’ve postponed my Fundraising Basics workshops on grantwriting and creating a fundraising plan from January to sometime in the spring. I’ll keep you posted on a date for those workshops. Let me know if you want me to email you directly when  dates have been set.

Market meltdown hits Vancouver Foundation

On Friday, the Vancouver Foundation announced that they expect a $10 million to $15 million decline in the amount they will distribute to the community in the coming year. In 2007 they distributed almost $70 million. Their funds, worth $760 million at the beginning of 2008, are now worth about $660 million because of the global economic crash.

This is going to be a huge hit to BC charities — some apply to the foundation for project funding and others have their own endowments within the Vancouver Foundation generating undesignated operating funds. You can read more about the decision in coverage by the Vancouver Courier here. And there’s more coverage by CBC here.

In Canada we are hearing a lot about how lucky we are that our economy has not been hit as hard as many others around the world. But it’s becoming clear that we can’t escape the impact. Many of our donors — institutional and individual — have experienced major loses. Everyone working in fundraising has to think seriously about how to make budget next year.

In coming posts, I’m going to give some ideas on how to work with donors and adapt your fundraising through these tumultuous times. If you have ideas to share, please do.

Fundraising Basics course registration open

For those of you in Metro Vancouver, I want to let you know that I’ll be offering a day of “Fundraising Basics” on January 14, 2009 at the downtown YWCA.

I’ve designed these two workshops for people who are new to fundraising or who have less than three years of experience — staff, board members and volunteers too. You can read all the details here. Early bird discounts are available until November 30 and you can register online for one or both. Participation in each session qualifies for 2.75 continuing education points towards your CFRE. Hope to see you there! Feel free to email me if you have any questions.

CRASH COURSE IN GRANT WRITING
Jan 14, 2009 • 9 am – noon
We’ll cover the basics of successful grant writing from start to finish. You will learn what funders want, how to identify potential donors, design fundable projects, write winning proposals and build relationships with funders. Learn from sample proposals and useful checklists to help you evaluate your own proposals.

CREATING YOUR FUNDRAISING PLAN
Jan 14, 2009 • 1 – 4 pm
Learn how to create a realistic and diversified plan to raise money for your nonprofit organization. We will discuss the pros and cons of common fundraising methods and how to maximize their success. You’ll learn how to make a compelling case to donors and how to steward donor relationships. Do you feel anxiety about asking for money? You’ll learn tips and techniques for conquering this fear.

Super smart viral video

Wow. I’m impressed on a daily basis by all the new ways the the web is being used to spread the word, get people involved and raise money for the US election. Fundraising is changing so quickly! And the election is showcasing the best and latest of every possibility.

Here’s a viral video I think you’ll like — making its point in a clever way and giving viewers to tools to pass it along to friends. Put your full name in to get the complete effect.

AARP 08 Video

Enter your name to see who can bring real change to Washington. First Name: Last Name:

Chart fun for nonprofits

Katya’s Nonprofit Marketing Blog has been hosting the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants and taking submissions of nonprofit graphs this month. Here are two of my favourites. The first is from Jeff Brooks and next two are from Jan Fonger and Kivi Leroux Miller. If you like silly graphs (and who doesn’t) you are not alone.

Tip of the Week: 11 Tips for Success in Grant Seeking

My friend and talented fundraising colleague Lorna Visser, Principal of Carmanah Strategies, has put together this super smart advice for grant seekers. Follow it — you’ll save yourself time and be much more likely to receive funding for your work.

11. Focus on quality, not quantity. Carefully preparing a few well-written proposals to funders with whom your work is an obvious fit is time well spent. Sending a blitz of formulaic requests to every funder in a directory is a poor use of your time – most, if not all, will go into the recycling bin.

10. Do your homework — learn what a foundation has funded before. Most have web sites that list their grants for several years back — easy to Google by foundation name. Take note of grant amounts, geographic range, and types of projects or organizations supported. (In the U.S., foundations are required to list their grants in their filings to the Internal Revenue Service on the Form 990. In Canada, the T3010 form contains useful information and can be accessed from the Canada Revenue Agency.)

9. Do your utmost to establish contact with a prospective funder before submitting a proposal. Be respectfully pushy — it may take several phone calls, e-mails or faxes. Ideally, meet in person, but at the least, have a telephone or email interaction with the funder to raise your profile and ensure that you have a chance of success. If you can’t get through to the program officer, try to reach her/his assistant or secretary. Ask what your best approach would be and what an appropriate grant request would be. If all your attempts to establish contact with a funder prospect fail (becoming more common in this era of voicemail and email), learn what you can from the other grantees you researched (see item 10 above).

8. Follow application guidelines closely. Don’t give the funder an opportunity to toss out your proposal because you forgot to convert your budget to US dollars or you didn’t include the required references or letters of support. Flouting a funder’s proposal-submission rules is a form of disrespect and likely to result in a one-way ticket to the recycling bin for your proposal or letter of inquiry.

7. Don’t try to bend your work to fit a funder’s criteria. They’ll spot you a mile away, quoting the famous line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet “the Lady doth protest too much, methinks.” If your project doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit.  And you do your organization a disservice to chase grants that require you to “mission-shift.” Don’t waste your time and the prospective funder’s.

6. Focus on outcomes, not tactics. Be clear about what will change as a result of your project (but don’t promise the moon). Understand the difference between outcomes (what will change, e.g. how people will change their behaviour) and outputs (how many times you do something — numerically measurable factors).

5. Be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-specific. Many proposals never reach the boardroom for consideration, because their objectives are too vague to warrant serious consideration. If you follow the SMART formula, your proposal will be sure to warrant increased attention.

4. Don’t promise the moon. Be realistic about what could be achieved in the timeframe of the grant and with the amount requested. Funders are usually more realistic about this than grant-seekers, who feel they need to dazzle with grandiose promises. If you over-promise and under-deliver, you are going to have a terrible headache at grant-reporting time… and your organization’s credibility will be lowered.

3. Set internal deadlines to complete sections of the proposal well in advance of the funder’s submission deadline. We all know this one, but yet somehow we’ve all been in the position of working on a proposal at midnight that has to go out the next day and then discovering that we need two letters of support from community partner groups – letters we don’t have. Check the funder’s proposal requirements well in advance and set deadlines for gathering data and completing each element required.

2. Make sure someone else reads your proposal and checks your budget before the package goes out. This not only ensures that typos and math errors will be caught, but it gives you a clever way to draw other people in your organization into fundraising. Ask them to be tough: will this idea fly? Have you presented enough evidence to prove your approach is credible? Will it make sense to an outsider or have you assumed the funder will understand your acronyms and organizational jargon?

1. DO THE BUDGET AND FUNDING PLAN FIRST. There is no point spending hours writing a proposal until you know what the project will cost and whether you can get the revenue to support it. Doing your budget and funding plan will get you focused on exactly what you need to do the project. Again, this gives you a chance to draw others in your organization into the proposal-writing process, because they will need to tell you what things cost. Once the budget is done, when you write the narrative portion of the proposal you can be clear and specific (e.g. “We will be hiring two outreach officers for three months. They will be making 60 site visits to landowners”, instead of “We’ll talk to landowners”).

And finally…

You’ve done all of the above, and you still didn’t get the grant. Remember that some of it IS just plain old luck. Don’t beat yourself up. Funders often have many times more worthwhile project proposals on a docket than they can fund. Picture them wringing their hands and weeping, wishing they could fund all the wonderful proposals put before them, but not having enough dollars to do so. Do follow up and try to find out why your proposal was rejected, as this will put you in line for more serious consideration next time, and allow you to refine your proposal to better meet the funder’s needs.

Happy grant hunting!

Click to download a PDF of Lorna’s tips.

Will the election hurt your direct mail?

Hi! Back from holidays and I’m thinking about the mail. Annual appeals. Renewals. Prospecting. If you are planning some big campaigns this fall, you might be wondering how the election will affect your direct mail program. Will your donors be so focused on Stephen vs Stephane or McCain vs Obama or Sarah Palin’s hair that your appeal will be forgotten? Will donors direct their gifts to political campaigns instead of your cause?

This is something that several clients have asked me about and so I’ve done some digging. As you can imagine, this is a big concern for nonprofits in the United States. Merkle, a US direct mail firm, has published a white paper on this very subject: “Examining the Impact of Political Fundraising on Non-Profit Direct Mail Performance.” Their conculsion: historical analysis indicates a highly active political campaign season should have little or no significant impact on a charity’s ability to fundraise via direct mail. Good news.

So no excuses. Get your letters written now!

Dear Mrs. Smith…

Summer break

Postings will be light and maybe nonexistent for the next few weeks. I’m going on holidays to Ontario, Quebec, then this crazy hot place and then this peaceful cool place. Hope you are having a lovely summer!

Here is a quotation from Sam Keen, which I hope you will heed: “Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.”

Honour a donor with a Giving Hearts Award

AFP Vancouver has extended the deadline for nominations for the Giving Hearts Awards. This is a very nice way to honour you most important donors in three categories: Outstanding Philanthropist, Outstanding Corporation and Outstanding Youth Philanthropist. The nomination is not hard to do and your donors will be honoured that you’ve taken the time to honour them in this way. The deadline is August 15, 2008.

For more information visit the AFP website to download the Giving Hearts Awards Information Sheet and Nomination Form. The Awards will be presented at this year’s National Philanthropy Day luncheon, November 14, 2008.