Develop a fundraising and marketing strategy
Every Child A Musician
"Working with Action Planning was an enriching experience for me and the team. We gained valuable knowledge and insights and underwent some extremely useful self-examination. The approach was tailored to our needs and was flexible on timelines, which we needed. The results of our work with Action Planning delivered a strengthened position for my service and our future plans."
NORMA SPARK, PROGRAMME MANAGER, EVERY CHILD A MUSICIAN
Background:
Every Child A Musician is a music service set up under the authority of the London Borough of Newham, providing free musical instruments and tuition to children aged 7 to 11. The service teaches 12,500 children every week, which equates to 360,000 music lessons per annum. It was in the process of externalising from the local authority to become a small business/charity and was looking for help with a new fundraising and marketing strategy. Action Planning was chosen from a shortlist of six charity consultancies.
Brief:
We were asked to work with the organisation to help consolidate and strengthen its draft fundraising strategy, which it needed to develop as a key element of its business plan for externalising.
Services:
We began with a scoping meeting with Every Child A Musician’s Programme Manager, Norma Spark, and carried out some background research before helping her to strengthen and expand the income generating strategy. This led to David Saint facilitating an awayday with the rest of Norma’s team to build their awareness and knowledge, while we also researched likely funding sources.
Outcomes:
The business plan needed to be sufficiently robust to pass through several stages of scrutiny by the local authority and the fundraising strategy was an essential element within that. To date it has passed successfully through about 80 per cent of the process and we have agreed to come back when the charity has externalised in early 2018 to offer further consultation.
Consultant's insight:
This was an exciting challenge, to help a local authority team adjust to the very different world of charity fundraising. It was important to understand and respect this different psychological starting point and build on areas of shared understanding and experience that could be used to relate to fundraising. It was great to see the ‘aha moments’ for this enthusiastic team!