Starting a Charity? Fund Development Planning -- Identifying Prospect Pools, Pt. 2

We're in the midst of putting together a Fund Development Plan for our new charity; we've dealt with the strategic plan, the case for support and the identification of specific projects; now we're into identifying or creating prospect pools, where we will find our donors. Yesterday's post had to do with individual donors. Let's see who else is in our pool of prospects.

2. Prospective Corporations, Community Responsibility – are there businesses or larger corporations in our community who could be persuaded to share a bit of their corporate responsibility money with our new charity? This, typically, consists of the contributions decided upon by the corporate or business owners or officers. These gifts are a way the corporation or business has decided it can demonstrate that it is a good corporate citizen in the community, and is supportive of efforts to create a better society.

3. Prospective Corporations, Marketing – would some of the businesses or corporations in our community be willing to “invest” in our new charity’s mission in return for some promotion and advertising of their services and products through our organization’s reach into the community? Contributions here are made chiefly for marketing and advertising reasons, and corporations making such contributions want to know how positively making such contributions will add to their bottom line – the profit they can make through sales.

4. Prospective Foundations – are there a variety of foundations in our southeastern Michigan region that would be attracted to our mission, and which would help our new charity accomplish its mission by way of grants? We acknowledge that today most foundations have their own program objectives which they want to accomplish, but we are confident that some of these will have internal objectives that are compatible with our own cause and mission. These will be the ones with whom we can create partnerships to accomplish our mission in the community.

Tomorrow we will put together some specific strategies about each of our four types of prospects.