Hello all,
Recently, I was in meetings with a broad cross-section of funders (mostly from foundations), and heard a lot about their concerns. After talking to people more one-on-one, it became clear that we should do something to combat the "fear factor" as one funder put it.
These sessions on fundraising challenges were very illuminating -- I've never heard a funder talk about being afraid to fund a project that doesn't actually solve the problem it sets out to solve. One idea I came up with to combat funder fear is for people to create a set of one-pagers that show off their project and address the challenges they face. Startups do this all the time when talking to investors, for the same reasons. But no one (AFAIK) in circumvention does this.
It's also a good way to answer questions that funders care about, without necessarily having to be in a funding/application cycle right then. Questions like:
- How does this fix [problem] in [country]? [2] - How does this contribute to your advocacy outcome? - (For some funders) How is this tied in with their ideal outcome? - How are you applying traditional M&E numbers to your tech projects?[1] As in, how many users are you helping, how many people get trained with the money you raise? How do you define success? Funders are leery of funding x developers to do y without that being mapped to projected outcomes. "We need $100,000 to fund 75% of one developer for one year" is not very useful without the context.
So I think that we should do this -- just create a one-pager for each of your projects and have it on your website. =)
best, Griffin
[1] Monitoring and evaluation [2] Here's a thought experiment: Define the problem, then try to solve it with your software. Is the problem fully solved? Why or why not?