Fund Development Strategy
Evaluating and clarifying your fund development strategy are important aspects of our strategic planning processes. A strong fund development strategy starts with understanding how your organization’s funding model supports, and can strengthen, your broader strategy.
For some organizations, this means redesigning their core funding model, or blending new approaches with existing ones. For others, it means solidifying what you’re already doing. With a clear direction articulated, organizations can use the insights to align resources and priorities to support focused execution.
As strategic planning consultants, we assess your organization’s funding model as part of overall strategy development and execution. We look at opportunities to deepen successful existing funding approaches while also identifying adjacent or emerging sources of revenue worth pursuing. We help you focus on the opportunities that offer the strongest fit with your organization’s capabilities and that have the greatest potential for impact.
Different organizations have different paths to sustainable funding. Depending on your organization, this might include strengthening relationships with a small number of major donors, expanding institutional or government funding, developing earned revenue, strengthening grant development, or pursuing other funding approaches. We help you assess which opportunities are the best match for your organization and how they fit together into a balanced, sustainable funding portfolio.
We work with you to examine your current funding model, interpret the findings, and develop a fund development strategy that aligns with your organization’s strengths, opportunities, strategy, and ambitions. By focusing investment and effort where your organization has the greatest potential to succeed, you can build a stronger financial foundation for long-term impact.
Fund Development FAQs
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A fund development strategy is an approach for how your nonprofit will generate the revenue needed to advance its mission and achieve its strategic goals. It considers your current funding model, the sustainability and fit of different revenue sources, and where your organization should focus its fund development efforts going forward.
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A fund development strategy focuses on the bigger picture: which funding approaches make sense for your organization, how they fit together, and what investments and capabilities are needed to support them. A fundraising plan translates that strategy into specific activities, priorities, and actions.
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Not necessarily. Diversification can reduce reliance on a single source of revenue, but pursuing too many funding sources can also spread an organization’s limited time and resources too thin. We help organizations determine the right funding mix based on your strategy, capabilities, relationships, opportunities, and risk considerations.
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Yes. We can help you assess potential partnerships, collaborations, new initiatives, and other strategic opportunities, including opportunities that may emerge through funders, partners, community relationships, or other organizations. We help you consider how well an opportunity aligns with your mission and strategy, the potential value and impact, the resources and capabilities it would require, the implications for existing relationships and commitments, and the risks and tradeoffs involved. The goal is to help you make thoughtful decisions about which opportunities to pursue, which to shape differently, and which may not be the right fit for your organization.