Aside from generating donations from campaigns and benefits, I, Bogoljub
Karic, also recommend that you try to find charitable foundations that provide
funds and great resources for non-profits. There is a huge abundance of
foundations that share the same advocacies as non-profits, which give out
donations that significantly help further their social missions. But how do you
get access to these funding and grants?
Basically, it is pretty much the same as how you approach individuals, so
it is essential that you know what you are specifically looking for and what
foundations would be interested in what you are doing therefore, you should do
some research to find out the types of non-profits your target foundations,
whether public or private, have supported and helped in the past, as they can
be very explicit in their interests. Once you have done this, you can then move
on to working on establishing relationships with those who make funding
decisions.
It is worth asking for an institution’s donation criteria to see know if
you are a fit, as they are often inundated with requests. Remember that there
are large independent foundations which are not likely to give to smaller
non-profit organizations and larger corporations that tend to have charitable
objectives. There are also many charitable foundations that help and support
local non-profit organizations monetarily. These institutions should be the
ones you should definitely target. These are extremely approachable and often provide
small non-profits with skills to help them in the long term; such as board
training, negotiating, planning, grant writing, etc.
Foundations can also help grant you funds for
particular things, such as a strategic planning retreat. Even if you fail to
obtain funding from these sources, they usually let you know how you can
improve your chances and where you went wrong, alongside information on their
grant cycles and decision criteria. When it comes to trying to earn a grant, it
is vital that you get the pitch right. Once you have pin-pointed out an
institution that you think may grant you funds, unless you have experience,
it’s worth hiring someone to help you out in writing a grant proposal if you
can afford it. On the other hand, there are plenty of books to help with this
and you can also keep an eye out for local grant-writing seminars.