Following the establishment of a CSO, and during the CSO’s lifetime, the need to raise resources becomes very evident and often a headache! Developing a plan to do this will make that job much easier. At the start of the process, it may be that the CSO’s founder(s) will self-fund the fledgling organisation, or may ask friends or family to make contributions.

However, in the long term as its objectives grow, it is not possible to run an entire CSO’s operations from the generosity of a wealthy supporter. If it has a generous supporter initially, it makes a CSO vulnerable to relying on that one source of income in the long term. The fundraising approach needs to meet the demands of the growing CSO.

The fundraising strategy, or plan, is essentially a map that helps the CSO identify the financial resources needed and how to access them efficiently, without wasting valuable time. Like the organisational strategy, the fundraising strategy needs to align with the strategic goals, outcomes, objectives, and activities the CSO wants to achieve, and having a template that helps to do this makes the task more manageable than taking an ad hoc approach.

Developing a useful fundraising strategy ensures that the CSO has a solid understanding of exactly who they are, their vision, mission and values, as well as their planned goal, outcome, outputs/objectives and activities. It is not possible for a CSO to connect with donors and to influence them to donate funds without being able to fully define and communicate this information – donors need to understand how their contribution contributes to a long-term change that they believe in.