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 This course will provide you with all you need to know to become an effective fundraiser. It will be of interest to anybody who works in organisations that don’t have professional fundraisers on their staff. You don’t need to be a specialist fundraiser to use the techniques we explore here; you are more likely to be someone who has to shoulder the responsibility for raising the funds while doing many other things.
The course is part of Learning for Change, an integrated collection of courses developed by Fahamu in conjunction with the University of Oxford.
Learning for Change pioneers a unique and innovative approach to learning. Using CDROMs, workshops and a learning community mediated by the Internet, these courses will help you build capacity with minimum disruption to your own work. Each course includes practical projects that will benefit your organisation directly.
Every participant who successfully completes a course will be awarded a certificate from the University of Oxford.
Objectives
This course will help you build the relationships that you rely on to do your work.
All effective organisations have a cause: they want to make a difference to the world around them. To do that, they need funds. Developing your own fundraising capability can make your organisation’s mission statement a reality.
Fundraising isn’t just about writing proposals or collecting money. It’s about winning hearts and minds. It’s about building a constituency of supporters for your cause. It’s about learning to communicate effectively with the public and developing a network of enthusiastic and committed supporters for your cause.
When you have completed this course you will be able to:
- Raise much needed funds for your cause
- Build a constituency in support of your cause
- Improve your chances of getting support from major funders, trusts and foundations
- Manage your funder relationships much more effectively
- Prioritise your time and energy, so that you are doing sufficient fundraising to get the funds that you need for your work.
FUNDRAISING AND RESOURCE MOBILISATION
Course structure and outline
The course is divided into two parts: public fundraising and institutional fundraising.
The public fundraising module will help you understand how to build a constituency in your community and raise funds from people.
The institutional fundrasing module looks at managing relationships with donor organisations and how to manage your own fundraising activities efficiently.
In public fundraising, we will look at how to:
- Mobilise support as well as funds for your cause;
- Get local people involved
- Organise local fundraising events
- Get support from local companies
- Get support ‘in kind’
- Raise money from diaspora communities
- Generate income
- Develope a fundraising strategy
- Communicate effectively
- Manage your donors.
In institutional fundraising, we will look at how to:
- Describe your organisation effectively to funders
- Manage your approaches to a limited range of funders more successfully
- Produce project proposals that follow a logical structure
- Produce a well-structured description of your project which links inputs of resources to outputs and outcomes
- Devise and implement a 'core funding strategy'
- Make the best use of your colleagues to help you with your fundraising
- Make the best use of the beneficiaries, volunteers and supporters in your fundraising
- Know when to adapt projects for funders without compromising your organisation’s core objectives
- Build and maintain relationships with your funders
- Establish and maintain an effective paper-based record-keeping system
- Identify potential funders
- Develop a fundraising plan.
Assignments and projects
You will have a number of exercises and assignments to complete as you work through the course. There are no tricks in the assignments; they simply aim to check that you have acquired the skills outlined on the course. If you are unsure about how to tackle an assignment, contact your tutor. You will not lose marks for doing so! You will also be required to undertake a practical project through which you will be mentored by your course tutor.
The workshop
The workshop will help you to develop some of the skills that are hard to develop with a CDROM. It will also help you with anything you don’t understand whilst you work through the CDROM. To get the best from this workshop, you need to have worked through the whole of this CDROM.
Email group
You are not doing this course on your own, though it may sometimes feel like it. You are encouraged to communicate by email with the rest of the group doing this course. Some activities are specially marked for email discussion. There is at least one discussion topic each week. You should also feel free to communicate with the group on any other exercises.
You can choose not to participate in a discussion if you feel it is becoming too time-consuming. However, we strongly recommend that you participate as actively as possible in email discussions to get the most out of this course.
Email discussions will be copied to the tutor but not assessed or moderated. Your tutor will not give automatic feedback unless you specifically ask for it. However, they will give you feedback or advice on the planning and execution of assignments.
When you have successfully completed the course, you will be awarded a certificate from the University of Oxford and Fahamu.
This course was originally developed with the financial support of the European Union, the British Department for International Development, and the Canadian International Development Research Centre.
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