What’s the most audacious vision of success you have for your organization? We invite our clients to brainstorm what the most optimistic vision of the future looks like – and then work backwards from there to talk about the activities we need to implement to realize this vision, the resources we need to do so, and the benchmarks and impact we measure.
How do you help your donors know your organization better? We’ll work to inventory connections and relationships that can help access the donors you want and develop a strategy of polite persistence to put them on a pathway to support.
Who are the best prospects for supporting your work? With an understanding of your programs and priorities, we can help identify prospective donors and provide the intelligence you need to prepare your approach.
What’s working well in your development operation, and what could be working better? Our consulting shop will strategically help you inventory your current donor relationships, past approaches (successful and unsuccessful), programs, and messaging to target your best opportunities for expanding your donors, increasing gifts, or defining fundraising opportunities around projects/programs.
How succinctly and successfully can you articulate what you do and why it matters? From evaluating and tweaking existing language to crafting mission statement and case for support language from scratch, we can help your messaging resonate with the donors you want to gain and keep.
Is the board helping or holding you back? Whether you’re a startup, longstanding institution, or organization in transition, orienting board members to the ways they can help secure the resources you need, and demystifying the fundraising process, can help foster more productive board engagement.
Recommended reading:
Anne Helen Peterson’s Culture Study
Mona Eltahawy’s Feminist Giant
Lyz Lenz’s Men Yell At Me
To support local abortion access or to give local:
Directory of local abortion access groups;
National Network of Abortion Funds.
Our support lawyering/legal defense:
Lots of other ideas and resources here.
A guide to relief organizations and funds, background reading and more from TPW.
The state of Ukrainian journalism via The Fix, and ways to support Ukrainian journalists.
Council on Foundation’s tracker of philanthropy’s response.
Center for Disaster Philanthropy’s updates/guides to the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine.
Making Investigative Journalism Sustainable from Splice Media's "How to pitch donors in a pandemic."
Growing your major gifts program — or getting one started in the first place — can feel like an overwhelming responsibility. The philanthropic landscape is extremely competitive, and the prospect of identifying and soliciting prospective donors can seem cumbersome and intimidating.
While the non-profit journalism landscape has flourished, opening up new revenue streams and business models to support mission-driven news, many organizations continue to rely on major gifts from foundations, high net-worth individuals, governments and multilateral organizations for the large investments they need to start up, Read the full primer for prospecting and cultivating donors.