What are the most effective strategies for a small, community-based NGO to secure long-term funding from international foundations and institutional donors?
Question submitted by: Elangwe Isaac Ngoe, Programme Officer, Taylor Moore Memorial Foundation, Cameroon
We hear this question most often when training early-stage organisations, and my answer is always the same: long-term funding follows a long-term vision. Without that vision, securing long-term funding is very difficult.
It helps to understand how donors work. Most donors want to scale impact that already exists. They very rarely design new programmes and then ask NGOs to implement them. It works the other way round.
The first step, then, is to make your organisation fundable and findable, as Kevin Brown famously put it. This is a big subject on its own, but in short it means communicating your results clearly, having a digital strategy, and putting the necessary governance and programme policies in place. It also means reshaping your organisation’s identity so that it is easy to understand, and generating the evidence donors need before they will fund you.
For example, if you work on youth empowerment, focus that work into no more than three main programme areas, which you can expand over time. For each programme, you should be able to identify your impact and communicate it in ways donors can easily verify.
Your organisation also needs a clear roadmap: a practical, straightforward, multi-year strategic plan. Organisations that receive long-term funding have long-term plans, and a strategic plan is one of them.
The strategic plan should set out annual deliverables that you can raise funds against. This approach is key to sustainable fundraising. Develop a robust fundraising plan to fund your annual programmes. The plan should identify specific funders and set out a strategy for reaching and engaging them. This approach has always worked for us.
(This answer was provided by Wycliffe Nyafuanga, a Kenyan resource mobilisation expert and grant funding strategist)
