Feasibility and planning studies

If you are considering a new fundraising campaign or a major step-change in your fundraising activity you are likely to want to be sure that your organisation is ready and properly equipped. A feasibility planning study can help provide this reassurance and / or identify, and recommend how to address, any ‘gaps’ in your readiness.

No two studies are the same but typically we would expect to undertake an initial piece of work to explore internal readiness, followed if appropriate by an external phase of testing the fundraising proposition with potential major donors.

The study is likely to have some dynamic effects including:

• a better-informed internal constituency with enhanced ownership of fundraising
• a Development Office that is more aware of its strengths and weaknesses and with coherent arguments for more resources if these are needed
• a compelling Case for Support that has been tested with potential supporters
• a bigger, better organised and better understood potential major donor pool
• a group of individuals who have participated in the study interviews who are better informed about the client, warmer to it and hopefully more predisposed to giving it financial support
• client understanding of what the close outside world thinks of it, what it has to do to improve its fundraising potential, where the best opportunities lie and how big those are, when they are likely to come and what constraints or incentives will apply
• an outline plan to implement a fundraising campaign and any resources implications associated with that.

Iain More Associates has conducted very many planning studies of this kind and we have developed a distinctive model for potential donor interviews which can be extremely beneficial to the client. We also, distinctively, are skilled in and take responsibility for organising these external interviews – removing a huge burden from already pressed client support staff.

Here are a few of our clients for this service:
Balliol, Brasenose and Christ Church, Oxford, École Polytechnique, Edinburgh and York Universities, Harrow Development Trust, IMD, INSEAD, London Business School, Pembroke and St John’s Cambridge, the Perse School, Queen’s University Belfast, the Royal Society.