By Alain Munyangabe – Training and Development Support Officer

Last Friday, our Organisational Development Officer for the South East, Beatriz Fernandez, in collaboration with Black and Minority Ethnic Community Partnership (BMECP), delivered an introduction to fundraising to RCOs they support in Brighton.

The morning session was delivered by Beatriz. It centred on how funders work; what fundraising is about and tips on how to write a better funding application.

I observed that the participants were more interested in the current trends of the funding climate, especially how funders are reluctant to meet the core costs of the organisations they fund to deliver a project.

Beatriz explained that any core costs must be met by the percentages derived from various projects the organisation is delivering.

She elaborated on the fundraising stages including the knowledge and understanding of the funding need, ways of demonstrating the need and how to write about the need.

She finished her slot by explaining to the participants the jargon used in the fundraising process such as outcomes, outputs, monitoring and evaluation.

The afternoon session was delivered by Doris Ndebele from BMECP. She used the “Awards for All” presentation in order to help all participants understand how funders work and what they expect from applications sent to them. She set the group an exercise based on case studies and the participants had to judge whether the applicants were meeting the funder’s requirements or not, such as outcomes they fund, budget limits, the originality of the project, and so on.

This exercise opened the eyes of one participant who seemed to have discovered why one of their funding applications was not successful.

The session finished at 4.30pm and the feedback showed that the participants had learnt and understood a lot about fundraising. The Basis Project has produced a fundraising toolkit for RCOs, which can be downloaded from our website.