Introduction to fundraising

This section provides a background to fundraising to help understand some of its nuances and why it is important to do particular things.

Background

These pages are designed to help you find the funds, large and small, to make it easy to turn your great ideas into reality and inspire your students with science.

Writing funding proposals doesn't have to be difficult. The secret is to understand the mission of the organisation you are writing to. To try and get a feel of what they are trying to achieve and how your work can align with their mission and help them achieve their goals. If you can do this it will make everything else easier.

Many organisations are keen to support schools and educational activities. The trick to getting them to support you is to be innovative and creative with the projects that you ask them to support. Make sure you can justify why you are asking for money and be clear on exactly what you are going to spend it on.

For example, school trips and taking pupils to events out of school have the power to engage and enthuse students. Just being somewhere new, where they are free to explore, experiment, test and discover can breathe new life into their desire to learn.

It is important to remember that you should look for funding that supports specific projects. You are very unlikely to get money to support the day-to-day running of your STEM Club.

In line with this, think about what you want to do and how you will use extra money to help you achieve your goals. For example:

Arrange some continuing professional development (CPD) workshops for your staff, using expertise from your local science centre.
Arrange a school trip for some sort of enrichment activity that enhances elements of the curriculum. Relatively small amounts of funding can cover travel costs and ticket costs. It's important to find out exactly what people will pay for as some organisations might even pay for cover teachers, if required.

Who provides funding

You might like to have a look at the glossary to fully understand terms such as ‘funding body’ or ‘learned society’.

There are two main sources of funding:

Funding bodies: organisations who support activities in a particular area by providing grants to other organisations. Funding bodies typically have application forms for you to fill in. They may also have calls for proposals. Funding bodies include learned societies, charitable trusts, and the Research Councils (see glossary).
Businesses: commercial companies that might be interested in providing financial sponsorship. For example, they might sponsor you because you are doing a project related to their area; because they wish to raise their profile in your location, or because they are interested in supporting educational activities in their area.

For information on writing proposals to funding bodies read the how to write to funding bodies section.

For information asking businesses for sponsorship, read the how to write to businesses section.

Matched funding

Matched funding (or simply match funding) is a way of asking multiple, different funders to support the same project. Often one organisation will provide the most money and you would approach them first, explaining that you expect to get 'matched funding' from other sources. The most straightforward example would be:

You need to raise £1,000
You approach a local charity and ask them to donate £500 towards your project on the understanding that you will raise the additional £500 through a separate fundraising activity.
You raise the additional £500 from running a charity event (for example, a fête).
Having raised your £500, the charity donates its £500.

This can be an attractive proposal for funders/ businesses since it means that essentially they need to give you less money, but they still get to support a big project. The important element is being able to get the biggest funder on board first. When you approach organisations, asking them for money, they are likely to show more interest if you already have a reasonable amount of money guaranteed for your project.

Evaluation & impact

Evaluation and impact (see glossary) are two important words for funding bodies. Because they work by providing financial support, they need to make sure that their support is being used as intended (evaluation) and that it's having an effect (impact).

When putting together a proposal for a funding body, you'll need to give details of how you plan to evaluate and show the impact of your project. You should find that the this process is useful in helping you to plan your project.

Where to start

Start by thinking of the project that you'd like to do. Consider how much it might cost. When you have an idea of how much money you need you can start to investigate the best place to look for financial support.

If you're looking for lots of money (for example, over £1,000) consider approaching a national funding body; for smaller amounts think about local charitable trusts (which are also funding bodies) or businesses.