Making Friends, one at a time

(Publised in Raisor's Ask - South Asia's Fundraising Magazine, Jan-Mar 09)

The melting iceberg of the financial market has hurt everyone, including foundations like the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA). Our reserves lie invested in financial instruments and our faith lies in what we can raise every year from foundations, corporations and generous individuals. Last week, when we were working on our financial plans for the year ahead, we realized that one of the things that might keep our morale afloat this year is donations that we receive from individuals whose passion for the arts may well overcome their caution in a tight, speedily declining financial tornado that we are currently subjected to.

However, organized fundraising from individual donors is new at IFA, started only about a year ago. The seed of the idea lay in the minutes of a Board meeting many years before I joined IFA, in the late nineties. A trustee had raised the question, “Why doesn’t IFA raise small amounts of funds from individuals who appreciate our work, have faith in what we do and would simply like to support us?” The idea always got paralysed with the question – but what do we give them in return? Digging up a question like that demands you find an answer to it. We searched for any research primary or secondary that could give us a clue as to what people expected from an arts foundation for small contributions. In a country where more than 90% of donations went to religious institutions, we found nothing that could help us.

At this point we came to know that one of our key funders, the Ford Foundation was making technical assistance grants available to its long time grantees to use it to upgrade their systems and processes and help with their fundraising. We applied for the grant for four different projects, one of which was to support a research across the country to be commissioned to AC Nielsen ORG MARG to find out people’s attitudes towards contributing to the arts and what they expected from it.

The study was done across middle and upper middle class individuals in 5 metros through group discussions and in-depth personal interviews. The highlights of the study had many startling revelations. The first of course was the overwhelming response that people did care about the arts and wanted to help in return for timely reporting on how their money was being spent and face to face meetings with the artists they were helping to support. Placing them on a matrix of their basis of engagement with the arts and their relationship with the arts, the study broadly divided the audience into three segments – ‘missionaries’, ‘intellectuals’ and ‘pleasure seekers’ (for want of better words!). The missionaries were those that had a serious and enduring relationship with the arts and believed strongly that they should support traditional and classical art forms helping them survive. The intellectuals on the other hand, while having a serious relationship with the art, were more interested in the advancement of the arts and believed that contemporary arts should be supported. The pleasure seekers had a rather casual and transient relationship with the arts and for them the arts were just a way of enjoying life. The study laid down the motivations for each of these groups to support the arts and made recommendations on how they could possibly be brought to support IFA.

Supported by the findings of this research, done for the first time in India, IFA conceptualised the ‘Friends of IFA’ initiative which was launched in February 2008. Through this initiative you could become a ‘Friend’ of IFA by donating Rs 2500/- a year (US$100 if you were abroad) in return for which you would receive the quarterly IFA e-newsletter, the biannual art magazine ArtConnect, our annual report and priority invitations/ discounted tickets to all our arts events. You could choose to contribute to any one or both of the two art funds we created – The Art Legacy Fund which would support the conservation of our cultural heritage and The Arts Innovation Fund which would support cutting edge contemporary art projects. We already had grant programmes that artists could apply to like Arts Research and Documentation Programme, Arts Education Programme, New Performance Programme etc., but we felt while these made sense to artists, the donors would require categories they could understand, realte to and support. Most grants we made could be divided up into the two categories we created - Arts Legacy and Arts Innovations. This we did keeping in mind the interest of the missionaries and the intellectuals that came through our research. We decided we were not ready to target the pleasure seeking of the pleasure seekers yet J

We have spent the last one year making a 100 ‘Friends’. Yes, the number is small. The universe of people who do donate in India is small and to find among them those that would consider the arts worthy of support is really small. However, we are now successfully creating partnerships with other cultural organizations to use their database to send out our appeals, making ourselves visible in various art festivals across the country and promoting this initiative at our own events, website and publications. Our current ‘Friends’ are championing our cause and slowly bringing in more ‘Friends’. So for us this is worth more than the money they have brought in – this means a 100 new people out there spreading our message and convincing more people to believe in what we do. To quote one of our ‘Friends’, Bunty Chand, The Excutive Director of Asia Society, India “Based on its stellar track record, I can count on IFA supporting first-rate and innovative work. IFA’s grants are a window to the energy and vitality of the contemporary arts scene.” When that’s how people believe in you, you just have no option but to keep your morale high even in troubled times.

Good for the Goose, not for the Gander

(Published in Raiser's Ask, The South Asia Fundraising Magazine July 2010)

Different donors have different reasons for giving, and deserve reports customised to their needs.

We human beings are good at showcasing ourselves in different ways. When we meet, for the first time, the parents of the person we love, we try our best to make them see that we’re honest, upright, have decent jobs, warm families, and will keep our partners happy. Bumping into a potential boss at a party before the actual job interview, we floor them with our passion for our work, our track record and belief in hard work. To the investor who has bankrolled our company, our words sound like the sweet ring of the cash register. In short, depending on whom we’re talking to, what our relationship with them is, what they expect of us and how deeply involved they are in our lives, we choose to highlight different aspects of ourselves in order to gain and build trust.

Distinguish between your donors

Why is it, then, that when it comes to donors, we lump them under a ‘Funder’ category and generalise their expectations? Building accountability towards our donors is also about building trust, and how we report on our spending of their funds forms a very significant part of that trust-building exercise.

I have raised funds from many kinds of donors – foundations, family trusts, corporates, individuals who live in India and NRIs. They have given funds to run programmes, underwritten specific projects, added to our corpus and supported fundraising events. In the process of meeting, discussing proposals with or just chatting over coffee with them, I have discovered one thing – each of these donors worries about very different things. Their motivations for giving are different, as are what they look for in an organisation they would like to support and the information they want from us.

Customise your reports

Precisely because each relationship with a funder is unique, building trust with them involves a different set of exercises in reporting every time. It wouldn’t be fair to generalise the expectations even of the various categories (foundations, corporations or individuals). While figuring out the specific needs of the donor is something that we do as we build the relationship, there are certain patterns I have noticed.

Foundations, for one, are keenly interested in the content of the grant. They want facts and figures, and in my opinion, probably understand the language of the development sector the best. They know the field well - therefore, they’re more understanding of challenges and shortcomings.

Corporations, on the other hand, need to understand what kind of mileage they might get from doing their good work. So, they would want to know how you gave the project publicity through media or your own newsletters. A report to a corporate donor would benefit from using less development-sector jargon, more corporate speak, and visible acknowledgement that reflects their brand image.

Individuals, however, prefer a more personal approach to the report. Often, individuals funding a project are also looking at educating themselves in the process. Hence, they would like you to go into interesting details, nuances of the projects and lessons learnt. Human stories work really well here, because the individual donor would love to know how his or her personal involvement has made a difference to someone’s life.

Audited financial data, however, needs to be a part of every report for every type of funder. All donors want you to be transparent about how you have spent their money. They want to see supporting evidence where possible.

Think out of the box

We often think that ‘reporting’ to our donors means producing a written document with required details and sending it to them at mutually-agreed-upon intervals. This, of course, is a necessary formal process. At the same time, I have often seen that informal ways of ‘reporting’ work well with various types of funders.

Phone calls to announce a new milestone crossed in the project, a chat over a drink to discuss a challenge that the project is facing, or even a quick email to say that everything is going just fine, make the funder feel that you consider them more than financial investors in the project. They feel in touch with what’s happening. It builds trust.

PS: Use common sense

Keep in mind, of course, that the approach you take with each funder will depend on where you are on the relationship curve with them. It’s a relationship like any other – you don’t want to scare away a new one by being too earnest, or let boredom creep into an old one!

The 10 Commandments for good report writing

1. State clearly why the funds were given and what they were supposed to achieve with specific reference to deliverables agreed upon.

2. Mention all the terms and conditions laid down when the funds were given.

3. Indicate the period for which you are reporting with dates and whether this is an interim report or final report.

4. Against each of the tasks set, report clearly what you have achieved and how.

5. Mention openly what you have failed to achieve and why. Indicate the specific challenges you have faced.

6. Always give correct and audited facts and figures. Also attach a financial report.

7. Unless given a prescribed format by the donor, use your creativity to make the report interesting with pictures, tables, graphs, story insets, appendices which are clearly marked, media coverage you might have received for your work, testimonials from your beneficiaries, quotes from staff monitoring the work, etc.

8. Check report for all errors in language, grammar, spelling and formatting. Make it easy and pleasurable for the donor to read.

9. Add your future plans at the end. You never know, the donor might be delighted with your report and want to fund you again.

10. At the end, acknowledge people who have helped you, evaluators, volunteers, specific staff members and the donor you are reporting to.