Fundraising acceleration for an education charity
Accelerated fundraising for an organisation with bold ambitions to change the educational and life outcomes of some of the UK’s most disadvantaged young people.
We designed and populated a new fundraising management system that stepped up the charity’s fundraising capability by focusing and facilitating their efforts, and significantly improved their pipeline of high-potential funders.
Context
Children excluded from UK mainstream education are educated in “Alternative Provision” schools. Their educational and life outcomes are shockingly poor. Our NGO client, a Multi Academy Trust (“MAT”) provider in the Alternative Provision sector, had bold ambitions to create a step change in outcomes, but faced pressing funding shortages.
To address this gap, they had established a charitable foundation to raise the funds to deliver key learning and development opportunities not covered by statutory funding. We were asked to accelerate the foundation’s fundraising efforts.
Approach
With no dedicated fundraising resources, the organisation needed to streamline and closely target their efforts, through a system that could be easily managed and maintained. Working with a small client team, we identified a long list of possible funders and developed a tool to describe, categorise and prioritise them according to weighted criteria around grant making type and size, causes supported and geographic focus.
The analysis uncovered a surprising number of grant making trusts who would fund a MAT and of others who would fund capital projects – a key requirement given the limited statutory funding available for these.
Impact
Only 6.5% of young people who sit their GCSEs in Alternative Provision pass English and maths GCSEs, compared to 65% in mainstream state schools. We are proud to support our client’s efforts to improve this alarming statistic.
Our work together led to a prioritised shortlist of new potential funders to approach, and significantly broadened the foundation’s high-potential funding pipeline. This, along with the new fundraising management system, has enabled a 6-fold improvement in fundraising efficiency.