Being a strategic fundraiser (Part 2)

Members – £295+VAT         Non-members – £395+VAT   (150 CPD points)

Interested to find out how to turn your fundraising priority or project into a compelling, fundable, multi-year case? Want to learn how to translate strategic intent into practical skills that enable you to tell a story, persuade funders and steward a successful donor relationship? This training is for you!

Following on from Part 1 of our Strategic Fundraising training, this session assumes a working level of fundraising experience – ideally you should be used to managing donor relationships and building cases for support. This session is about helping you hone those skills into a repeatable strategy that builds on individual projects instead of reacting to one-off bids and funding proposals. Our trainer for this session is Jo Redhead, former Research Business Development Director at think tank RUSI and a person with a wealth of fundraising experience with some of the world’s most influential foundations.

You can attend Part 2 without having attended Part 1 but we do recommend completing Part 1 first, if possible. This session builds directly on the priorities working document developed there.

Where Part 1 takes a step back to look at your organisation’s fundraising as a whole, Part 2 brings the focus back down to the strategic priority you personally want to pursue and how to turn it into a compelling, fundable, multi-year case. It’s about translating strategic intent into practical skills: how you position what you’re asking for, how you tell its story, and how you judge which opportunities and relationships are actually worth your time.

We ask attendees to bring with them an idea for a project, programme or funding priority to use as a basis for the session’s exercises, making the training as practical as possible. We look at the project you have brought with you and build out: from a one-sentence positioning statement, into an impact-led narrative, into stronger donor relationships, and finally a decision-making framework to help you negotiate what leads and proposals are actually worth your time.

By the end of Part 2 you will have:

• A one-sentence positioning statement for your funding priority
• An impact-led narrative connecting your project’s outputs to real-world change
• A practical approach to stewarding existing donors and spotting relationship red flags
• A checklist for approaching new donors strategically
• A personal go/no-go decision tree for evaluating future funding opportunities
• A consolidated, reusable fundraising strategy to take back to your organisation

Course outline:

Introduction

•  Recap of Part 1

Framing your project

• A live exercise building your one-sentence strategy

Connecting projects to impact

• Translating outputs into an impact-led narrative
• How to improve your proposals with case studies

Stewardship & growing existing relationships

• Moving from transactional to growth/partnership-focused relationships
• Spotting relationship red flags and common roadblocks

Approaching new donors strategically

• Setting up new relationships to be trust-based and impact-led from the start
•  Crowdsourced checklist of what works

Go/no-go framework

• Building a personal decision tree to decide which opportunities to pursue
• How to be consistent as an organisation

Evergreen fundraising strategy & wrap-up

• Consolidating your positioning, impact narrative and decision tree into a reusable core strategy

Wrap-up

Trainer:

Jo Redhead founded Big Picture Funding after three years as RUSI’s first Research Business Development Director, where she built and led a high-performing centralised BD team through major shifts in the funding landscape. This followed five years at the Center for Global Development, where Jo co-led a team across Washington D.C and London. Using a relationship-led approach to foundation fundraising, they delivered an annual funding target of $25m+. Jo’s fundraising experience spans many of the world’s most influential foundations – including the Gates Foundation, Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy), the European Climate Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and CIFF – as well as successful bids to the UK and US governments, Global Affairs Canada, Sida, Norad, and GIZ. She has also worked to secure places in major European Commission and UKRI research consortia.

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