I promised in the last blog to come back and cover unit costing in a little more depth. But before that I’d like to divert briefly from the Ten Steps to the Perfect Funding Bid, and say a little bit about corporate fundraising in difficult recession times.
I’ve been developing a new training course with my colleague Margaret MacKenzie of The Swan Company (www.theswancompany.co.uk – strapline “taking the cold out of calling!”). She’s an expert in business-to-business relationship building, and we’ve come together to combine specialisms and to help charities and VCOs to find ways of extracting cash from businesses.
So will a business, facing another difficult year, stump up funds to a local charity? We would argue that it depends on how you approach them. And this highlights a really bad habit that I think VCOs fall into. We tend to focus on what WE need, and how brilliant OUR project is, and we think that this is enough to convince the whole world to be hugely impressed and instantly give us all the funds we need. Well here’s the reality check – it ain’t that easy. Businesses are not charities and they aren’t grant-making bodies. They need a reason to give out their hard-earned cash, especially at the moment.
And what we will be helping VCOs to explore in our new training course, is how to show the businesses that there are good solid reasons, and that supporting a local charity can make good business sense. We need to think not about what we need, but what we can offer. This also has the advantage of making the relationship a more equal partnership, rather than one of supplicant and benefactor.
So we’ve got some guinea-pigs coming along to the first “Cracking the Corporate Coffers” day on January 19th, and I’m happy to write more on this topic if it’s of interest. Click through to my website for details of the training course www.tessex.co.uk
Next time though, it’s back to the Ten Steps to the Perfect Funding Bid. I think we’re up to 8b!
© Tamara Essex 2011
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