Fundraising with the community: steps to success

In the roundtable podcast episode Win-Win: Fundraising relationships for lasting impact we explored how community engagement can unlock additional funding for schools. With so many pressures on school, it’s essential that those involved in income generation use their limited time wisely. Our four guests help us unpick how analysis, understanding and listening first pay off in the long run. 

Steps to success

1. Understand your stakeholders.
2. See things from a community perspective.  
3. Explore motivations.
4. Tell your story.
5. Build ongoing relationships.

Contributors

With 20 years’ experience in the education sector, Justin Smith provides specialist marketing, income generation and bid writing services through his company, Chameleon Consultancy and Training. He has secured over £7 million in additional income for schools.

Vicki Newsome is School Business Manager at Burscough Village Primary School and Nursery in Lancashire. Vicki has generated over £300,000 additional income over the last two years, for a new nursery building and community sports zone, as well as securing funding for a counsellor to work across the local schools.  

A seasoned fundraiser and community champion, Matthew Smith MBE is School Business Manager at Sheringham Woodfields School in Norfolk, for pupils with complex learning and health needs. The school’s specialised therapy centre is one of his most recent fundraising achievements.

Richard Manville is Co-founder and Managing Director of Community Inspired, a social enterprise dedicated to communities, fundraising and volunteering. Through FundEd and PTA+ Richard helps schools access grants, run successful events, build recurring income and develop partnerships.

Understand your stakeholders 

Justin Smith: It’s a good idea for schools to do a little bit of work on stakeholders. You could call it stakeholder analysis, but literally what it means is listing the stakeholders that you work with, or you engage with to some degree, internal and external.

Some of those will be an interface stakeholder because they're a bit of both, like governors, trustees and PTAs. 

But just take time to think about who those stakeholders are and ask ourselves really direct questions. Are we engaging well enough with them?

Talking and working with our community groups is incredibly important. Sometimes we forget about who those different groups are. Lettings is a great example – people who hire our facilities, actually that's a community group. Do we engage with them or is it just a transactional thing? 

Just listing the stakeholders and making sure we talk with them and listen to them is a great starting point. 

Value internal stakeholders 

Vicki Newsome: I think stakeholder engagement is really important. Something that's helped our project immensely is making sure that our internal stakeholders are bought into the project. So your pupils are number one. Usually these projects are driven from the pupil voice anyway, based on  what they want and what they need. So having them bought into it means that they’re likely to push that onto their families and talk about it in the community.

But also a big thing for us is having our staff on board as well, so everybody that works for the school knows the project that we're working on. And they actually support us with the fundraising, going out and speaking to other people in the community about it. That's really, really helped.

Audit your parents 

Matthew Smith: Each year we'll do a parent and carer skills audit. We engage with parents so that we know their expertise and therefore we can tailor what we are discussing in terms of big projects. For example there might be architects, builders or landscapers amongst our parent community group.

We don’t expect things to be done for free, but we absolutely want to keep and foster a really positive relationship. What we've found is that parents want their children's schools to be the very best school that they go to, so why wouldn't they want to be involved?

Start from a community point of view

Vicki Newsome: When we started doing the work on the playground project, I had a few knock backs. It really made me think about the direction we were going with the project, and then it made me reconsider that, especially from the community point of view.

So we changed what we were asking for, to make it a lot more community focused. We looked at what the community needed from our school and the provision, and changed the offering. 

I think it works when you look at the title of your project as well. So we called it ‘Community Unity through Sports’, and that's very much what we focused on. Having that link to the community was really beneficial. 

Justin Smith: The lottery actually talks about beneficiary shaped projects; that's what they want to support – beneficiary shaped projects. They’ve made a video to try and put that message across to us as grant writers. 

So in other words, we need to demonstrate how our pupils have shaped how this thing looks, and if that means going back to our stakeholders and redesigning it, reconfiguring it, coming up with a name for it, having a competition so those kids can get involved in coming up with the name, that's what funders want to see. That’s precisely what Vicki did! 

Richard Manville: I think you need to focus on outcomes and the impact rather than focusing just on the money. Make your fundraising causal: focus on the benefits for the children and what you’re trying to buy, rather than just general fundraising. 

Explore donor motivation

Justin Smith: For me, it's the motivation thing that’s fascinating. Because the best grant applications are the ones that combine the rational argument and the emotional storytelling.

So people are motivated by rational things and emotional things. It’s a grey area, because often there’s an element of both – like a Venn diagram. You could list all of those rational elements on one side and the emotional stuff on the other. And there's an interface, there's a bit in the middle.

But we have to understand what motivates people. Grant funders are motivated by the outcomes, and it's really clear because they state those. But when it comes to community engagement, donations and volunteer time, we have to ask ourselves the question: why are they getting involved? What do they want from this relationship?

How are we going to motivate them? What are the outcomes? What's the purpose? 

Sometimes it might come naturally, but it takes work and time. So developing the rational and the emotional argument together, putting that story together in a way that motivates our internal people as well as our external – I think that's fundamental. 

Tell your story 

Richard Manville: Often we find that businesses in communities do want to work with schools, but they just don't know how to get involved. So schools that can go out, use marketing strategies and spread the benefits of what the school's doing, storytelling, talking about what they're doing, the projects they've got and how that will benefit the community, will benefit. 

Lots of schools are raising funds for projects that actually have a community involvement as well. It might be a community garden, a football pitch, or an immersive classroom that people within the community can use. 

Where schools do market and promote themselves, that creates a really good feeling in the town itself, and people do want to get involved. 

We wrote about a school in Kent that got an MP involved in their fun runs. They got Kent Radio along and then everyone knew about the project. So people then chose that school as their charity of support, because of the promotion in the community, and everyone feeling proud and wanting to get involved. 

Building those stakeholder relationships helps make your fundraising more sustainable over time. So when you go back to people to ask them for more funds later on, because you've communicated the success so well about what you are achieving for the children, it makes it easier for you to go back to them and continue with future fundraising. So it helps just grow and grow from that point of view. 

Say thank you 

Matthew Smith: An active strategy at our school, and something that a lot of people tend to forget, is to thank people that have donated. And not only to thank, but to update and to keep linked and interested. 

So any newsletter that goes out to our parents that talks about our therapy centre or playgrounds, or our mini buses or charity shop, will also go to the funders that funded that project. 

Those people that had a significant role in fundraising and grant making with us would be invited to our whole school Christmas lunch or our craft fair or school show. And they’d be given VIP seats at the front. 

So we have a strategy of that continuation of communication with those people that have given.

Justin Smith: Absolutely. Donor motivation is key, but that is lost immediately if you don't thank somebody. They've put time, effort or their own money – but often it is volunteer time, and that's a resource that just disappears really quickly.

Also, people want acknowledgement in different ways, so we have to check in with them. They may not want their name up in lights, they may not want their name engraved on a board. They might do, but we need to have that conversation. 

What next? 

Listen to the full roundtable episode (41 minutes)

Explore related reading:

• Five steps to effective school fundraising 
• Optimism and opportunity: creating an income generation culture 
• Let the children lead: growing greener schools and communities 
• Anchored in the community 
• Beyond the budget: why income generation is everyone's responsibility