Get, Set, GO! Fundraising

Anthony David

Description

Get Set GO! Fundraising is aimed at early years settings and Children's Centres that are new to the world of fundraising. The book offers a wide range of ideas to support you as you venture into the financial world of fundraising. Set out in an easy-to-read style, you can dip into the book at any point, with each page set out in a range of helpful headings to get you going as soon as possible.

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 17 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9781909101104
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
GET SET GO! FUNDRAISING
A Step-By-Step Guide To Fundraising For Your Early Years Setting




Publisher Information
Published by Practical Pre-School Books,
A Division of MA Education Ltd,
St Jude’s Church, Dulwich Road, Herne Hill, London,
SE24 0PB.
Tel: [phone]
www.practicalpreschoolbooks.com
2012 digital edition by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
© MA Education Ltd 2010 Illustrations by Cathy Hughes. Front cover image © iStockphoto.com/Jill Chen
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.



So Where Do I Start?
If you haven’t fundraised before this is easily the best question to ask yourself. However, there are some quick steps you can to take to prepare yourself for this new role and to give yourself a sense of control.


The temptation is to start trying to raise money immediately. Don’t. Whilst your role may well have resulted as a need for funds within your centre you need to do a bit of preparation before actually raising your first pounds. First of all, prepare yourself. This can be best done with an organised approach to your new role. Invest in a nice new folder (ideally a wide A4 one as you will soon fill up a slim one) and a pack of plain dividers. Use the following titles on each of your dividers: Action plan Project brief Project financial plans Legal documents (i.e. building permission) Letters (to community) Letters (to financial partners) Fundraising action plans Publicity
An organised file will give you a confident start. A small tip when choosing your folder; choose one you like. This might sound odd but it is your folder, and if you have invested a bit of time in choosing one you are more likely to maintain it as a record of your work than a recycled one from your centre. It will also reflect your personality, which is no bad thing in finance.


Your next task is to identify what your centre or nursery is aiming to raise funds for. Ideally you would begin getting to know what charities or fundraising bodies that are available to you before you do this as it might save you time in the long run. That said, if the project is one that you all feel strongly about then there is a good chance that you will raise the funds for it one way or another. So, discuss the project’s aims with different groups of people. Be sure to include parents, and if you can children, as well as staff. This will give you the opportunity to clearly understand the aims of your project and to test whether, once discussed with other groups, it is genuinely something that as a community you feel you want to proceed with. This is important as fundraising, particularly the first time, is challenging and can be time consuming. If your project is strong you will be prepared to invest time in it, as will other people, and it will feel more like a cooperative project rather than just you in isolation.
Next, you need to assess what sort of funds you are aiming to raise. Whilst you will have had a general idea of the types of figures needed during the consultation process you will now need to confirm these figures. This will, in all likelihood, involve builders, electricians, plumbers, and a whole range of other types of service providers. If you are working within the building trade it is standard practice to obtain three quotes on any project that is worth over five thousand pounds. This, again, takes time but it will minimise any hidden costs later in the project that you may not have planned for. Your site manager may well be able to support you, or even take this role on themselves. Don’t be afraid to delegate - everybody will want to say that they did their bit once the project is completed so give them the opportunity to be involved.
Once this stage of the project is complete you are just one step away from beginning to raise money and doing the job you were asked to do. This next stage, however, is the most important. Consider how you are going to subdivide the project into manageable chunks for fundraising purposes. By doing this you can attribute aspects of any pot of money to a section of the project. If it’s new flowerbeds then the £10,000 cost to install them can be attributed to a large awards body such as Awards for All, whereas the £750 needed for the plants and equipment may have been raised at an auction by your parents. This approach also makes fundraising easier as you can do it in chunks, rather than all at once. From an awards body’s point of view, they prefer to see that other organisations are involved in your fundraising as it minimises the risk of the project failing to secure all the necessary capital to get off the ground in the first place.
Once you have all of that sorted on paper (or at least in your head) then you’re ready to start fundraising, and working your way through the nuggets of advice in this book.


Fundraising in a recession
September 2008 is a month that is likely to resound in the annals of time: banks collapsing, respected businesses going into receivership, stock markets crashing and then crashing again, and trillions of investments being wiped. It was an extraordinary period in history. In a desperate attempt to minimise the affects of recession the Bank of England practically scrapped the idea of an interest rate on March 5 th 2009 by reducing it to its lowest percentage (0.5%) since the bank was established in 1694. The financial impacts have been swift and acute. The social impacts will, unfortunately, be measured over time.
The fundamental question that has been asked is ‘how did this happen in the first place?’ After over a decade of growth had we become complacent or was it simply a case of being addicted to debt? Arguably the warning signs had been there for a long time from the bursting of the digital bubble in the Far East in the early years of the 21 st century to the anticipated collapse of an artificially inflated housing market. Had key lessons been ignored? Possibly.
Fundraising has been, for decades, a significant feature of pre-school life. The summer fair is part of childhood, it’s almost a rite of passage. Cake sales, quiz nights and auctions are all important aspects of a healthy nursery and indicators of an established community. Much of this book examines how you can take advantage of the fundraising potential that our modern community offers. If you like, it validates the notion that early years providers can fundraise.
This book also tests the position that early years providers take with economic wellbeing. The Every Child Matters outcomes, set out in 2004, clearly state economic wellbeing as one of the 5 core aims. Yet this has been an area that centres have struggled to evidence. In as much as early years provision is a forum for teaching children to socially interact, it is equally an ideal place to teach children how to become financially aware. The social affects of September 2008 will resound in some communities for years. If we’re to avoid this happening again we must address the need for economic wellbeing today or risk failing to prepare children for one of the most significant aspects of their adult life.






Fundraising Principles
Key to any fundraising activity is to know what you are fundraising for. This may stem from a particular vision, change of emphasis, or a good suggestion from a parent or advisor. In any case, you should have a clear idea of what your project entails, why it is needed and what you need to do to make it happen. This does mean a little bit of homework but that research should be enough to allow you turn a suggestion into a concrete plan. It also gives you the thinking space to sort viable ideas from ones that, although may be good, just don’t fit your setting.
Ideas and activities
Your early years setting’s aims will often be the link between funding bids and site improvement. Get to know the aims, talk to the people who defined them and try to identify the key areas that you feel you are most likely to be able to find funding for.
It is a bit of a bit job but an audit of skills within your community (including carers and staff) will give you a good idea of the types of skills available that you could access. Current or past occupations can be of great use within a school and willing carpenters, glazers or plumbers can save the school a lot of money. Equally you may reveal a few gems such as statisticians, accountants and professional fundraisers.
Your project action plan will reflect two key areas: your vision/aims and short term improvement plans. Your action plan should tightly reflect these aims so that what you are doing complements current practice rather than overloads it.


Ideally your action plan should run from April to March, following the financial year. This might mean a shift if your plans normally operate along traditional term time lines. The financial year is different and as it governs anything to do with finance you will have to adjust to it to take advantage of all fundraising opportunities (see page XX for further examples).
January or February is a good time to bid for a project as fundraising bodies may well have funds that they are trying to clear from the current year before the year end. It will mean that your project must be completed by the end of March, but if you have a smaller project that could benefit from an additional few thousand then this is a good time of year to bid for it (consider it a Spring present!)
As with any aspect o