Corporate Fundraising – Free Workshop

Free workshop to help small charities and NGOs to fundraise effectively with corporates.

We often get asked, especially by smaller charities and NGOs, how they can be more effective at corporate fundraising. For the worthiest causes with limited budgets we respond with a free half-day tailored workshop. So if you think you are in this category please do give us a call. If you don’t fall into this category, but would still like a workshop, we’d still be delighted to talk.

Our view is that motivating financial supporters is as much about listening as it is about transmitting information, and knowing when and how to approach. So we usually start with a listening and cooperation exercise to see who can absorb and use information quickly, who truly listens, who can stick to their objectives and ultimately who comes to the best and most amicable outcome. There’s usually lots of creativity, earnest discussion and laughter – and at the end a demonstration that concentrating on what someone else is saying (rather than just what you want to say) can make a huge difference to success.

With this understanding of the how best to listen and understand others’ points of view we work together to examine your corporate fundraising proposition, and particularly what is distinctive or motivating about it from a donor’s perspective.

This is the sort of exercise that organisations can agonise over for days, months or even years without coming to a conclusion. We agonise with you for just an hour or two to shake out what a great proposition could be, how you could communicate it, and especially how it can be proved to be honest, powerful and robust.

We don’t rewrite propositions on the day of the workshop – but we find our clients often want to afterwards. A clear proposition makes it so much more obvious who should be approached for corporate fundraising support.

Our broader work is aimed at establishing and deepening lasting partnerships principally between corporate donors and great charities and NGOs, and we apply learnings from this to the workshop .

This longer-term approach provides stability, reduces stress and allows cooperation to deepen and broaden. Not every donor can work in this way and so we work with you to identify the likely characteristics, both organisationally and personally, of potential long-term supporters to help avoid a lot of wasted effort (and depressing rejections).

It is this personal element that easily gets forgotten, and we try to put this back – with a final exercise in pitching to a ‘real life’ potential donor. Team members are asked to build on what they have learned and work out how to meet the donor, what to say and what to ask for.

People’s approaches are extremely varied – from the very forceful to the mild and cooperative; from a facts-based approach to one steeped in emotion. There is no single answer and indeed different approaches will work better with some individuals than others. What has often surprised us though is that the some people who believed that they would never be able to ask for support, or craft a partnership, surprise themselves and their colleagues with their abilities.

By the end of the day we expect you to be able to listen more attentively, express yourselves more clearly and target potential funding partners much more effectively – and truly to understand the etiquette of corporate fundraising.

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‘PP ran a really engaging fundraising workshop for us using practical exercises to put us into the mindsets of possible funders and how they might see us, and exploring how we could present ourselves to get a better return for our efforts. Everyone came away feeling far more confident about how to make ‘the ask’. We would recommend Powering Partnerships to anyone in the charitable sector who wants to build their confidence, focus and funding.’

Migrants Organise

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If you would like to arrange a workshop, do get in touch. We give away twelve free a year and run others on a paid-for basis.