Community Funding Top Tips
Is your community group seeking external funding to develop a new project or to continue delivering existing activities or services? Here’s some top tips and resources to help you with your fundraising.
There are some initial steps to take to ensure that you might be eligible to seek external funding in the form of grants, loans, donations from businesses or individuals, or crowdfunding.
You will need:
- a constituted decision-making structure of at least three unrelated people
- two unrelated bank signatories and a way of recording and publishing your accounts
- if you are working with children, young people or vulnerable adults, a safeguarding policy and procedures.
For larger sums, and if you plan to employ people as part of your project, you will need to ensure that you have the organisational structures and policies in place to manage and support the operations of your project.
There is useful information, practical support and templates for policies and procedures available through Gloucestershire Rural Community Council to enable you to develop your organisation to be ready to undertake fundraising.
You might have a brilliant idea for an activity or project, that you are sure would really work in your community. But what evidence or information do you have that your idea is shared by others and wanted in your community?
If you are raising money for an activity or project, you need to be really clear about why this should be supported. Sometimes it’s very obvious – a roof might need to be replaced, a salary for a youth worker needs to be continued or a weekly group needs funds to hire a hall. Other times it might be less obvious. You could think about:
- community consultation – you could do a survey, hold a conversation in your community, talk to other local organisations
- using data available from Inform Gloucestershire to understand your community and the people living in it
When you are looking for information, think about how you will involve other people who will be impacted by or engaged in your activity, and how you might make sure that they have a say in how the project moves forward. Make sure you don’t only ask ‘the usual suspects’ to feed in their views but think about how to get information from people who might otherwise get left out of your community planning – maybe because they are not able to write down their thoughts or contribute through coming to meetings.
There’s some useful advice and information on community consultation available from GRCC or you might want to look at resources available through the NCVO.
Knowing what you want to do, how much it costs and when you need it
If you are raising money, you need to be clear on what you plan to spend it on, how much it costs and what timeframe you will spend it over.
Developing a clear, costed and timed plan will help you identify what you need and when you need it by, so that you can explain to funders what you are seeking money for and why you need it.
Your plan needs to be agreed by your group, so that everyone knows and agrees what you are trying to do.
There’s a really helpful guide to planning and budgeting available from the Resource Centre.
If you have identified a need for funding through your budgeting process, it’s a good idea to look at your options for fundraising. There are lots of different ways of raising money – different activities are useful for different amounts of money and engaging different people. You could think about:
- fundraising events
- donations from individuals
- membership fees or subscriptions
- approaching local businesses for donations or in-kind support
- a ‘crowd-funding’ campaign, where different people club together to meet a fundraising target
- applying for grants from grant giving organisations.
If you decide to apply for a grant from a grant giving organisation, undertake your research to identify funders that you are eligible to apply for.
If you are looking for grant funding, you might want to check out our list of suggested funders and top tips for searching for funders.
Before you sit down to write your application, make sure that your group or organisation and the project that you want to apply for is eligible. Don’t waste time in writing applications where you aren’t sure – if in doubt, give the funder a ring and talk to them.
There are many sources of advice on writing applications – this is a useful guide to learning more about how to write persuasive applications.
Don’t be discouraged if your first try at raising funds doesn’t work. Get your group together and talk through what you’ve learned from the experience. Ask the people who you were raising money from why they didn’t fund you. Reach out for support from the Community Funding team or another organisation to help you hone your plans.
Remember that wherever you have raised the money from, you will need to report back on what you did with it.
Ensure that the money is spent on the plans you made. If things aren’t going to plan, be honest with the funder – let them know about any changes or developments to your project. Funders understand that things change and will want to see your project succeed.
At the end of the project, evaluate the activities that you undertake, and let people know what happened. This will help you in future fundraising – when you can show that you use funders’ money well, they are more likely to give again in the future.