Finding new Ways to Earn Funds
Howard Lake | 8 November 2010 | Blogs
It’s easy to think of turbulent times as just a threat, rather than an opportunity. After all, aren’t lots of our donors about to lose their jobs and won’t statutory grants be drying up soon? The challenge then is to look beyond the usual solutions and find new ways to raise resources.
This of course is easier said than done, but if we want to become less dependent on grant makers and donors and to control our organisational destinies, then the way to achieve this is surely to EARN more of our income.
Social enterprise has been flavour of the month for some time now, but how many organisations are really maximising their opportunities here? If your charity has significant assets (such as buildings, land or specialist knowledge), it is usually possible to put these to use in earning additional income for your charity. But what if you do not?
One organisation I came across recently is a social enterprise called Kids Taskforce, which works with schools to deliver messages about personal safety. As an organisation, it is not large or rich but it does have an asset – its relationships. Kids Taskforce is very well connected in several spheres and is using this to develop a new income stream. Here’s how it works.
Kids Taskforce has entered a deal with a software company and has been given the rights to share the revenue earned through the sale of a new product known as Tonermiser to companies and public bodies. Tonermiser can potentially save large organisations a fortune in laser ink cartridges, by reducing the amount of ink used in document production (and we all know how expensive that is). There is also a big environmental benefit by reducing the number of cartridges used.
What Kids Taskforce has achieved here is a new stream of unrestricted income, simply by using its relationships to help introduce this product to new customers. More information about this is found on the Kids Taskforce website: http://www.kidstaskforce.com/tonermiser.html (incidentally, I understand Kids Taskforce is willing to share its revenue stream with other charities that help it to introduce Tonermiser to large companies and public bodies, so if you have such relationships, do get in touch with them).
Although this is an unusual example, it does demonstrate that, where we are prepared to be entrepreneurial and use assets we had not previously exploited (in this case, relationships), then new forms of income can sometimes be identified. So what assets could your charity put to work?
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.