If you take the time to develop an effective fundraising campaign design, you will not only ensure a more productive fundraising process, but set yourself up for fundraising success.
It’s important to budget for your fundraising in both time and money as many Founders and CEOs wait until it’s too late and are already financially challenged going into a fundraising effort. This results in not being able to dedicate the right amount of time, placing pressure on the process, and quitting 3 feet from gold, so to speak. We see this too often, unfortunately.
So, what might an effective time commitment look like, you may ask?
There’s what we like to refer to as the upfront work and then there’s the actual fundraising work. From our experience, they both require a similar amount of time to move through. Most people that have been fundraising and do fundraising for a living typically suggest that it’s going to take about three months to take your offer out to market and to complete your fundraising efforts. So three months is a typical benchmark. Now of course, it could happen faster if you have a good network. But it may take longer if you’re really having to create new prospects and reach deeper into the marketplace to find the right investor or if you are going out in a depressed investment climate.
There is an additional factor that we at The Change Agent HUB see affecting this timeline as well. We differentiate just looking for money for money’s sake from really looking for what we like to call Aligned Capital Partners, people that are really vested in your mission and in your impact model. And they’re really getting behind it from those levels, which means that your search for Aligned Capital Partners is actually a higher order process than just looking for money. This is a different caliber investor actually, a different profile. And so that can make the process more involved in the actual fundraising part of it. But the other side of it is actually being prepared to go out for fundraising, which typically adds another 2 to 3 months for putting together all the requisite packaging in order to do that.
So all in all, we think a reasonable assumption going into the idea that you’re needing to raise money is you might as well figure on 6 months; 3 months to put all the materials together to go do it, and another 3 months to actually go raise the money. Which means if you’re a startup entrepreneur, you need to begin with the end in mind. So, at what stages are you envisioning needing to go raise money and are you pre-planning for that? Having a larger calendar perspective that’s really looking at these critical milestones of when you’re going to need to infuse capital into your business allows you to plan ahead with materials ready to go out and fundraise.
So in summary, it’s important to plan for your fundraising in both preparation and actual fundraising time in addition to the financial budget requirements. If you don’t know what you need, it may be difficult to plan it. If in startup mode, this is where you might need to hire a qualified financial consultant to help you through this critical planning process.
Want to get prepared to raise capital successfully?
Download our Free Fundraising Checklist Here: https://thechangeagenthub.net/fundraising-checklist
Once you receive the checklist you’ll be redirected to a video walkthrough so you can use this checklist most effectively. And you’ll also be invited to check out our 9-step fundraising preparation roadmap with detailed information called Impact Incubator Immersion. This program is the exact process all our impact clients have used to raise capital successfully.
