Get, Set, GO! Fundraising: A step-by-step guide to fundraising for your early years setting

By Anthony David

Get Set GO! Fundraising is aimed at early years settings and Children's Centres that are new to the world of fundraising. The book offers a wide range of ideas to support you as you venture into the financial world of fundraising. Set out in an easy-to-read style, you can dip into the book at any point, with each page set out in a range of helpful headings to get you going as soon as possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark Allen Group
• Release date: Oct 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9781909101104

Anthony David

Anthony David is head of psychiatry at the renowned Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London and a practising clinician at the Maudsley and Bethlem Hospitals, South London, the country’s leading psychiatric institution. He is also the director and Sackler Chair of the UCL Institute of Mental Health. He has published over 500 peer-reviewed articles and is editor of the journal Cognitive Neuropsychiatry. He also wrote the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of R D Laing's The Divided Self.

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So Where Do I Start?

If you haven’t fundraised before this is easily the best question to ask yourself. However, there are some quick steps you can to take to prepare yourself for this new role and to give yourself a sense of control.

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The temptation is to start trying to raise money immediately. Don’t. Whilst your role may well have resulted as a need for funds within your centre you need to do a bit of preparation before actually raising your first pounds. First of all, prepare yourself. This can be best done with an organised approach to your new role. Invest in a nice new folder (ideally a wide A4 one as you will soon fill up a slim one) and a pack of plain dividers. Use the following titles on each of your dividers:

Action plan

Project brief

Project financial plans

Legal documents (i.e. building permission)

Letters (to community)

Letters (to financial partners)

Fundraising action plans

Publicity

An organised file will give you a confident start. A small tip when choosing your folder; choose one you like. This might sound odd but it is your folder, and if you have invested a bit of time in choosing one you are more likely to maintain it as a record of your work than a recycled one from your centre. It will also reflect your personality, which is no bad thing in finance.

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Your next task is to identify what your centre or nursery is aiming to raise funds for. Ideally you would begin getting to know what charities or fundraising bodies that are available to you before you do this as it might save you time in the long run. That said, if the project is one that you all feel strongly about then there is a good chance that you will raise the funds for it one way or another. So, discuss the project’s aims with different groups of people. Be sure to include parents, and if you can children, as well as staff. This will give you the opportunity to clearly understand the aims of your project and to test whether, once discussed with other groups, it is genuinely something that as a community you feel you want to proceed with. This is important as fundraising, particularly the first time, is challenging and can be time consuming. If your project is strong you will be prepared to invest time in it, as will other people, and it will feel more like a cooperative project rather than just you in isolation.

Next, you need to assess what sort of funds you are aiming to raise. Whilst you will have had a general idea of the types of figures needed during the consultation process you will now need to confirm these figures. This will, in all likelihood, involve builders, electricians, plumbers, and a whole range of other types of service providers. If you are working within the building trade it is standard practice to obtain three quotes on any project that is worth over five thousand pounds. This, again, takes time but it will minimise any hidden costs later in the project that you may not have planned for. Your site manager may well be able to support you, or even take this role on themselves. Don’t be afraid to delegate - everybody will want to say that they did their bit once the project is completed so give them the opportunity to be involved.

Once this stage of the project is complete you are just one step away from beginning to raise money and doing the job you were asked to do. This next stage, however, is the most important. Consider how you are going to subdivide the project into manageable chunks for fundraising purposes. By doing this you can attribute aspects of any pot of money to a section of the project. If it’s new flowerbeds then the £10,000 cost to install them can be attributed to a large awards body such as Awards for All, whereas the £750 needed for the plants and equipment may have been raised at an auction by your parents. This approach also makes fundraising easier as you can do it in chunks, rather than all at once. From an awards body’s point of view, they prefer to see that other organisations are involved in your fundraising as it minimises the risk of the project failing to secure all the necessary capital to get off the ground in the first place.

Once you have all of that sorted on paper (or at least in your head) then you’re ready to start fundraising, and working your way through the nuggets of advice in this book.

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Fundraising in a recession

September 2008 is a month that is likely to resound in the annals of time: banks collapsing, respected businesses going into receivership, stock markets crashing and then crashing again, and trillions of investments being wiped. It was an extraordinary period in history. In a desperate attempt to minimise the affects of recession the Bank of England practically scrapped the idea of an interest rate on March 5th 2009 by reducing it to its lowest percentage (0.5%) since the bank was established in 1694. The financial impacts have been swift and acute. The social impacts will, unfortunately, be measured over time.

The fundamental question that has been asked is ‘how did this happen in the first place?’ After over a decade of growth had we become complacent or was it simply a case of being addicted to debt? Arguably the warning signs had been there for a long time from the bursting of the digital bubble in the Far East in the early years of the 21st century to the anticipated collapse of an artificially inflated housing market. Had key lessons been ignored? Possibly.

Fundraising has been, for decades, a significant feature of pre-school life. The summer fair is part of childhood, it’s almost a rite of passage. Cake sales, quiz nights and auctions are all important aspects of a healthy nursery and indicators of an established community. Much of this book examines how you can take advantage of the fundraising potential that our modern community offers. If you like, it validates the notion that early years providers can fundraise.

This book also tests the position that early years providers take with economic wellbeing.