It's a no brainer just read on...

There are measurable and proven reasons why you should outsource your fundraising to Emica Fundraising. 

Timing – You really want someone to start writing bids immediately, there will be a few opportunities around over the next two months that you are not going to have time to put together. Hiring a project manager wouldn’t enable this to happen.

Confidence in the fundraiser – Don’t even consider this unless we bother to demonstrate our knowledge of the funding scene. We will quickly understand your needs and will suggest sensible funders to approach. Feel free to call up on some of our previous clients who will tell you how wonderful we are as a company.

Track record – Our consultants collectively have delivered many millions for all of our clients, and have a very good grasp of everything funding related. We are people that you will feel you can work with. Also being so involved in funding and the scene for many years, we have contacts and opportunities to hear about that may pass others by.

Workload – right now, hiring another post is going to be more work at what could be your busiest time. Plus if you don’t have 30k for a Project Manager and you would really be looking for a project manager to support with the actual activities right now rather than bids as the two don’t usually fit in one role easily – and one of the first jobs we could do would be to fundraise for his/her salary. (See below)

Serious fringe benefits – the other attraction from using us is that our insistence that we want to get more involved that just writing bids, we want to do Business Development as well. With the packages we propose, we get a set number of bids per month as standard but we will also write and produce your Business Plan with us and the same for our Annual report. You probably won’t have an EFFECTIVE annual report anyway save the narrative that goes with the yearly accounts and we feel this would be a great benefit, particularly at the end of this year, when you will have delivered. We will get everything captured and produced professionally with our in house designers etc. A great resource going forward.

Also on this, are very much into monitoring and evaluation and would be able to work with you to set up a monitoring system before we start this full on year, to more effectively capture all that we are going to do. This also makes sense as then this can be better represented in the Annual report we will produce. These are things you really do need to do, (as opposed to nice little extras) and maybe have wanted to do in a while but haven’t been able to for the usual capacity reasons, so these will be attractive.

Risk – you don’t have to take on a 12 month contract, and if we aren’t doing what we say we will do you can end the contract. With a project manager there are also risk of recruiting someone that may have all the CV for fundraising but then doesn’t come up with the goods...and then you have a contract etc. Yes there is a 3 month probation period etc, but it’s difficult to use this with fundraising as many bids will not come back in the first 3 months......

At 2/3 bids a month – that’s 24/36 bids a year, you can’t really imagine finding sufficient funders to apply to with more bids than that in year anyway – but if you got a Project Manager, he/she would therefore need to be spending the rest of his / her time supporting the activities and not writing even more bids. In our experience, it’s not easy to find someone who has skills to write excellent bids who can also manage people and projects. So in my mind £12,000 (from starters) for a year with us farms out exactly the specialist bits of work you may want us to do and pay for them to do it, leaving a project manager in due course to support all activities where you really need him/her in a clear role.

So it’s difficult to compare costs, because to compare the Project Manager and Consultant cost wise you have to assume both will be able to write bids of the same quality, and I don’t think this is easy when you need your PM to also have people skills to fill the remainder of their time..

But to look at the value of what we are offering for (from) £1000 a month for 2 bids plus the business support or the starter pack for £6,995...

If we assume each bid takes an average of 10 days (and that is conservative). Some take longer (Lottery, YPF, EU) some quicker (Trusts, AFA etc).

That’s 10 day’s work a month minimum to submit 2 bids. So we would be paying them £250 a day.

Add in the costs we would have spent on monitoring system set up (1.5k minimum) the Business Plan and production of the Annual report (£1.5k minimum) taking that 3k off the £12k annual budget means you are paying £750 a month for 2 bids, or £187 a day for their services.

So we are convinced it’s worth a shot for your organisation based on all this.

The question is, are you? If you’re still on the fence, give us a call.

Call Jonathan on 0161 6389238 or 0161 6389354

Mobile: 07912083449

Or fill in the enquiry form on the contact page for a quick and fast response- within 2 hours- guaranteed.

Over 73% of organisations we surveyed were using cut and paste methods and regurgitating the same information time and time again for vastly different bids. Is this the correct way to approach fundraising? No! This is the way to face rejection after rejection. Did you know that many funders speak to each other and share data on applicants? Yes, they do. Every funding application is different. Please don’t use one template for all your funding bids. It won’t work. Conversely, it could damage your chances of success and will almost always damage your credibility.

Fundraising is time consuming. With over 10,000 sources of grant funding to choose from (and billions available) the process can be a real minefield. In fact, most organisations regularly overlook the funding sources that could be just right for them. The bottom line is that most staff are very busy delivering on the ground- these jobs require their total attention. It is completely impossible to focus properly on fundraising whilst delivering projects for your target groups.