The big idea

Understanding the relative strengths of your various fundraising activities is important in helping you to decide where to invest your resources. Sargeant and Jay (2004) have developed an approach that looks at how attractive your fundraising activities are externally. It also asks how appropriate your activities are for your particular enterprise. That is, how well they fit with your purpose, resources and culture.

Purpose

This tool provides you with a mechanism for assessing the attractiveness and appropriateness of your fundraising activities (Figure 1). It is designed to encourage you to develop clear criteria against which to evaluate your fundraising efforts. It also provides a decision-making framework in terms of where to invest, where to clarify your offer and where to disinvest. 

Figure 1 Analysing your fundraising portfolio (Sargeant & Jay, 2004

The Tool

The tool will take you through a number of steps for ranking the appropriateness and attractiveness of your fundraising offer. It can be done on your own or with a group. It is most applicable to enterprises in the non-profit creative and cultural sector. The initial analysis will probably take one to two hours, depending on the extent of your fundraising activity.