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Funding Framework for your Board Retreat

For Impact Ideas, Leadership and Boards | | Nick Fellers

I was in New York City last week facilitating a day-long strategic funding retreat for a board and senior staff.

This organization doesn’t have a very extensive fundraising history or culture. It was beginning to think about some major needs in the coming years — and possibly a campaign. Our goal was to go from the starting line – a discussion about the need for funds – to have the entire team on board with a story, a strategy and an action plan.

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This framework is mash-up of our Sales Process and POV. It could be used with ANY BOARD.

The Framework served as our agenda for the day. We started with the Impact -> Income napkin and worked our way to mapping out the story. Conversations about the WHO and the HOW are completely different after everyone see’s the compelling story and how a case-for-support could be exciting.

We then moved to the WHO. Prospects and Team. Before laying the groundwork there were lots of questions about prospects. AFTER we had a story and message the number of prospects seemed to triple (as it always does).

Finally we moved to identify the HOW. There was no way to launch this org into a campaign at the end of one day. Instead we defined success as getting the organization started with a sales process. That is… the ability to identify prospects, engage them with a great story and get some really big gifts for projects.