Asking Twenty Questions in Four Communities

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Dianne Aigaki

We’re currently working with the non-profit community foundations in Napa Valley, New Orleans, Yakima Valley and Austin to survey the training needs of their local non-profits.

The goal? Show foundations and investors the results and get a five-day capacity-building training in Grant-Writing and Project Development underwritten so non-profits can attend free of charge.

Below is an article recently posted by Monica Williams, Editor of GivingCity Austin. The original blog post is here.

June 7, 2012

“Do Austin fundraising professionals need training in capacity-building fundraising?”

Well, we know our friends at Texas Association of Nonprofit Organizations, Association of Fundraising Professionals-Austin and Greenlights offer this kind of training. We know their seminars are well attended and highly praised.

But here’s your chance to answer that question.

The Funding Forum has asked GivingCity to help them get responses to a survey about training needs in Austin.

The Funding Forum training started in the United States and grew out of Dianne Aigaki and her team’s experience as grant-writers, fund-raisers and staff of nonprofit organizations.

“After 20 years in the field, we’d reached a point where we felt it would be even more satisfying to train the staff of nonprofits to write their own proposals rather than them coming back to us year after year for new proposals.”

“We loved being in the role of guiding nonprofits to not only answer the tough questions demanded for solid project development, but actually training them to write the project plan and proposal themselves — and in 5 days time.”

Since the training was so cost-effective, time-effective and had a positive long-term impact on local organizations, they started offering it all over the world in countries that needed this kind of training the most. “Now we’re coming back full circle to the U.S.,” says Aigaki.

“The Austin area is the perfect host for this kind of training, we think, because it’s a relatively young philanthropic community with a lot of energetic, thoughtful and knowledgeable fundraising professionals. We hope to help elevate their work and give them the tools they need for real results.”

The survey asks Austin professional fundraisers 20 quick questions about their training needs. The Funding Forum will use the information you provide to create training for the Austin area that will be free to attendees. And we will share the results with you in the next issue of GivingCity Austin (available July 10).

We’d love your participation. Please take a few minutes to respond. Thank you!

Our One Page Pitch to Investor/Donors

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Dianne Aigaki

The Funding Forum offers donors/social investors an opportunity to be directly involved in exponentially improving the effectiveness of the non-profit sector.

How? By sponsoring a unique capacity-building training, which teaches non-profits to do solid project planning, raise funds for program implementation and perform sound evaluation so they can make effective use of philanthropic dollars. We embrace the “teach them to fish” philosophy in a way no other training does.

The Results: Since 1992, over 2,000 participants representing 1,000 non-profit organizations have attended Funding Forum workshops. Evaluation from 527 organizations shows the following:

89% received full or partial funding.
97% said the training improved the effectiveness of their organization.
100% said they would recommend the training for other non-profits.

Two Unique Funding Forum Approaches:

I. Non-Profit Incubator: Intensive five-day project development/proposal writing training where 30 non-profits:

Write a boardroom-worthy development plan/grant proposal for a real project, including solid needs assessment, objectives, sustainability strategies, monitoring and evaluation plan and line item budget.
Receive one-on-one guidance on project development from a team of onsite daytime editors and a global team of night editors so participants have fresh feedback awaiting them each morning.
Walk out of the training with a completed project plan and funding proposal in hand along with a list of potential funders to contact.
Receive six-month follow-up support and evaluation from the Funding Forum team.

II. Funding Forum Capacity-Building Conference: The five-day Non-Profit Incubator training for 100 non-profits, plus keynote speakers from the philanthropic world, funder meet and greet with attendees, live blogging from the conference to engage donor/investors, post- conference workshops in Monitoring and Evaluation, Non-Profit Budgeting and Accounting, and using Social Media to get the message out.

No other training program in the country provides this level of guidance and support, led by a team of professionals with 35+ years in the non-profit/philanthropic sector.

Pitching Your Idea to an Investor/Donor

Posted on March 31, 2012 by Dianne Aigaki

You’ve heard of the Elevator Pitch? That’s your chance to convince someone important who’s standing next to you in an elevator—that you have a great idea—all in 30 seconds.

The Elevator Pitch is now happening in Shark Tank. Have you seen the show, Shark Tank?

It gives hopeful entrepreneurs the opportunity to pitch their business ideas to a group of investors, aka “The Sharks”, for an investment in their company. Wondering how this relates to you as a non-profit or you as a donor? Keep reading.

In Shark Tank, each entrepreneur makes a short pitch to the investors before answering a round of quick-fire questions. How can they respond to these questions so quickly? Because they’ve done their solid project planning-–and that’s driving the Pitch. They’ve got the details down pat.

The producers of this reality show didn’t pull the idea out of thin air. It’s based on reality. And the reality is investors, whether they are looking for business or philanthropic opportunities, often start by listening to a quick, clear, concise pitch—which is pretty much impossible to create without your planning already in place. It’s the Pitch that often gets you in the door—memorable enough to get a potential investor/donor (who might just be the guy at the next table at the café or your neighbor over for dinner) to light up and ask you for more.

Look at these pitches from three Silicon Valley startups, UrbanSitter, Ravn and Blippar, trying to attract investors on Bloomberg.com. These folks say their piece in 30 seconds.

Pretty impressive, huh?

It’s not a huge leap to see how this model could help the non-profit world. For non-profits, the process of boiling your project down to a few simple sentences forces you to get clear quickly, and when you make that call to a foundation office, you can capture the attention of whoever answers the phone. They will hear (or see if you’re in that elevator) the passion, enthusiasm and strength behind the vision.

If you’re a non-profit, we challenge you to write a 30-second pitch script. Don’t worry about being the next Scorsese or finding a camera guy or editing it. Just focus on the words. There are a lot of great resources out there like this how-to-video on TechCrunch. In this video, Adeo Ressi, Founder Institute founder, suggests you use a Madlibs like approach to get your pitch down to a single sentence.

Founder Institute founder, Adeo Ressi, gives great advice.

When you’ve got your 30-second pitch written, post it in the comments section and we’ll give you feedback.

If you’re a Foundation, we’d love to talk to you about the idea of asking for pitch videos along with project proposals. Do you think it would result in better proposals? What about better use of philanthropy dollars?

And, of course, we should walk the walk ourselves. In the next month, we’ll be posting our own 30-second pitch video. Stay tuned.

A Lesson From Our 8-Armed Friends

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Dianne Aigaki

I was reading Wired’s April 2012 issue and came across an insightful article called When Catastrophe Strikes, Emulate the Octopus written by Rafe Sagarin who is a researcher at Arizona’s Institute of the Environment.

Sagarin’s thesis is that governments and businesses can best respond to disasters not by having one perfect centralized plan, but rather by having decentralized decision makers empowered to attack the problem as they see fit.

He sites the octopus as nature’s best example of this. The octopus has survived for 3.5 million years because it uses many different tools to avoid threats: it can spray ink, it can quickly whoosh away, it can hide in tiny spaces, and it can camouflage its body to the environment.

Not just one tool, but many.

This got me thinking about how non-profits help solve the problems that plague us on a daily basis: hunger, water sanitation, child abuse, etc. With over a million non-profits (and growing) in the United States alone, the sector is no doubt decentralized. In fact, it’s too decentralized. It’s like the octopus with hundreds of arms, and Arm #71 has no idea that Arm #6 exists.

We experienced this in a training in Northern India where we had two non-profits, sitting right next to each other, both working on water sanitation issues, not having met each other before and not having any idea they were trying to solve the exact same problem.

One ended up focusing on putting water filtration systems directly into the community water system while the other decided to focus their efforts on moving outhouses further away from the water wells of the community to prevent ground water contamination. With a collaborative proposal, they joined forces and sent one project plan/proposal to potential funders. Two arms attached to the same animal.

This is just one small example of how getting all non-profits working on the same issue in the same room can be extremely powerful. It creates a scenario like Sagarin is suggesting: powerful parts that make up an adaptable whole.

Isn’t that what we all want for the non-profit sector?

Asking the Right Questions

Posted on February 25, 2012 by Dianne Aigaki

Is the non-profit sector broken? Is it beyond repair?

Can social entrepreneurs solve world problems better? Do corporations do it better?

What role should non-profits have in the world? Should they even exist?

These are some of the questions that have been raised in the press and in foundation boardrooms. It’s a conversation that’s been happening in whispers for many years and outright blatantly in the last five.

Having worked in the non-profit world for over 40 years, we’re no stranger to these questions. We get it. And, frankly, it’s valid they’re asked, but we do have a different perspective.

Yes, we see donors who have worked hard for their money and want to improve the world, but worry about their resources being diluted and wasted through projects that don’t live up to their initial promise. But, instead of looking at the non-profits they fund as irredeemably compromised or broken, we see organizations with vision who have not been properly trained to translate this vision into action.

In essence, we see potential. And if there was ever a time to unlock the potential of non-profits, this is it.

Let’s stop griping about non-profits, acknowledge they have a legitimate place at the table in solving the world’s problems and do everything we can to empower them to reach their potential. Our strategy isn’t mind blowing, it’s pretty simple: Let’s train them to think clearly, create solid project plans and translate these plans into action.

How much good can we do if we stop bashing non-profits and take 5 days to teach them the project development skills that entrepreneurs often learn in business school?

Can you teach non-profits these skills in only 5 days? We know it can be done, we’ve been doing it for 20 years.

What if we trained 1,000 non-profits every year? Wouldn’t that change the game?

How many people will those capable non-profits then be able to help feed, educate, and thrive?

How many funders will look at the proposals they receive with anticipation rather than dread?

Welcome to our blog. This is where we’ll ask and answer the non-profit sector’s toughest questions.

-Dianne and Allison