Fundraising is most effective when the charity or organization has a solid reputation, high professionalism and shows excellent service delivery to beneficiaries. Often it is not the project proposal itself that receives the funding, but rather the organization. Below there are some key performance indicators that demonstrate added value of your organization and that will help increase your success in raising funds.

• Your services are needed and delivered regularly to the communities
• The overall activity of your organization is in line with local, national policies
• You deliver what beneficiaries exactly want based on needs research conducted by you regularly
• You practice a client-oriented approach while dealing with beneficiaries
• Strong service monitoring procedures and impact evaluation
• A professional website that is updated regularly
• Sound financial management
• A high quality annual report that demonstrates all of the above

Our consultants can help you develop any of the areas above - whether it's advice on a monitoring system, designing a professional annual report or planning of the website content.

Please get in touch for an initial discussion of your needs.

Our research databases, as well as many years of experience in professional fundraising enable us to produce tailored listings of extensive funding opportunities appropriate for any organization or project. We liaise with your existing fundraising team to complement your own in house services.

Our consultants will research application procedures, deadlines, funders' priorities and eligibility criteria on your behalf. We can also enquire directly if appropriate, discussing your organisation's objectives and proposals with potential funders in order to pave the way for your applications.

Our research can be presented in your or our template, which is usually in MS Excel. This will contain relevant contact information, typical grant sizes, web addresses, specific comments to consider and all of the information you need to start developing and submitting applications.

A fundraising strategy is essential to ensure the growth and sustainability of any charity or not for profit organization. We can work with you to establish how best to achieve your goals. We will take your internal capacity into consideration along with relevant external factors that may impact on fundraising.

We can offer a reasoned analysis of funding opportunities, including essential advice on choosing the key donors; presenting your pitch, establishing timeframes, prospect research, community consultation, service monitoring and evaluation, as well as options for diversifying your funding portfolio.

Fundraising strategy support can take a range of forms. Some clients find that just a half-day consultation can have a transforming effect on the future direction of their organization. Our experience working with many charities enables us to quickly identify the best fundraising opportunities in any given sector and actions required for our clients to embrace those opportunities. We would be delighted to discuss your needs. Please get in touch to see how we can support your strategic development.

We can offer you a package of fundraising services. Our outsourced fundraising service typically focuses on Donor Prospect Research and Bid Writing, often with some strategic development input or staff mentoring as required.

This is our most popular service and proves highly effective for our clients. Our fundraising consultants undertake full management of grant and contract fundraising, incorporating on-going prospect research, bid writing and guidance on strategic planning. Close contact is maintained with the client throughout via email and telephone. as well as attendance at regular meetings to review progress and consult on future priorities and strategy.

We complete your federal grant application, private foundation proposal, or letter of inquiry, ensuring that it is highly competitive and thorough. We develop budgets in coordination with you. Therefore, making sure that all staff and office costs are covered, and the costs of key activities are competitive
and in line with market prices.

We proofread your grant proposals before you submit them, making sure your message is clear and that you have followed the instructions provided by the grant maker. A second set of eyes on your proposal is always important. We will also help you in identifying the gaps, and suggesting the interventions linking to the broader national, regional and global context. This will make your proposal more relevant to the Donor's goals. We will also help you in incorporating cross-cutting issues into the Project Cycle such as Sustainability, Environmental Sustainability, Human-Rights Based Approach and Gender.

We offer private coaching sessions to make suggestions and offer advice for your grant proposals, including offering insight on why you may not have received funding in the past and what you can do to improve your proposals to be more competitive in the future. This service could be also helpful for independent fundraisers. We could also provide official statement confirmed by our expertise. Based on additional agreement we could assess several grant applications submitted for funding within certain period of time.

When you are developing your Project Proposal you may get stuck at the Monitoring and Evaluation section. The Donor will ask you to outline the methodology and Evaluation plan, and you are not sure how to go about it. We will assist you in drafting the Monitoring and Evaluation Plan based on a Logical Framework, and advise on the methodology to be applied.

Monitoring plans specify what is to be monitored, how the monitoring will be conducted, who will carry out the monitoring, when and how frequently the monitoring will be conducted, the methods that will be used for monitoring, and the resources that are required for monitoring. You will receive Results Monitoring Framework and we will provide clear instructions to the parties responsible on data collection and data storage.

External Evaluation can provide evidence-based assessment of the worth or significance of a Project or its components. Mid-term Evaluations serve to provide project managers with recommendations for improving the project's performance and for the best use of the project's resources. Final Evaluations assist in showing the donors the social impact of the program and serve as a powerful fundraising tool. Always include the monitoring and evaluation into the Project Design to strengthen your proposal.

Ex-ante evaluations focus on relevance of the Project to your programmatic goals.

Mid-Term Evaluations focus shifts towards effectiveness, achievement and recommendation for improvement.

Final Evaluations serve to assess the sustainability and impact of the Project.

Seeks to explore an experience to discover, build and gain insights into human behavior, opinion, motives or attitudes through the use of observation or dialogue. In the result, you will not receive specific numbers but obtain information on the social, psychological and cultural aspects of the issues you study. Specific techniques include: focus groups, in-depth interviews, workshops.

This type of research is mainly used to collect specific statistically significant data on the subject of study: insights from stakeholders, target groups, businesses and social institutions. Quantitative Research is the formalized form of study, when a specific set of variables is identified from the start. In the result, you receive definitive answers which you can attach values and measures to. Quantitative Research works well for the situations when preliminary hypotheses about the object of the study are already developed and information is needed to make decision or plan specific actions.

Specific methods of the quantitative research include face to face surveys, postal surveys, phone and online surveys.

Basic service needed to start any research project. The questionnaires are an important tool for gathering primary data. Poorly constructed questionnaires can result in errors and invalidate the research data. A well-designed questionnaire motivates the respondent to provide complete and accurate information, while sustaining the interest of the interviewer in completing the session. The Development Solutions will help you to effectively design your surveys and show you the methods to implement them in order to collect the relevant information regarding the current and future performance of your activities.

Specific research tool aimed at assessing feasibility of the action or project you are planning to start. This technique helps you before you make that decision that is going to change your life, "Look before you leap". Starting a new activity or a project is every person's dream. However, proper assessment of main risks and prospects before you start prevent you wasting your time, efforts and money afterwards. Well-designed needs assessment and feasibility studies often serve and the generators of new ideas and projects and can be also used as a brainstorming technique in project development.

Desk Research - is a form of research which applies a mix of quantitative & qualitative techniques, where the information is collected using secondary data (i.e. gathering and analyzing data which was already collected by another person or organization). Secondary data can be found from a variety of sources – the Internet, newsletters, company annual reports, newspapers, database searching, associations/trade bodies or by ad hoc personal contacts.

Desk Research offers a number of advantages:

It's a quick method of collecting information, Desk Research is easier than field research, secondary data is often ready to use and process. Open data from various state and non-state sources (statistical agencies, professional and expert organizations) are usually the main source of information for desk research. However, this method can have disadvantages: secondary data may not be recent, it might not be accurate and sometimes data is hard to find, depending on subject matter.

This technique is used to consistently document and show the results superior to those achieved with other means, and that is used as a benchmark. In addition, a "best" practice can evolve to become better as improvements are discovered. Best practices are used to maintain quality as an alternative to mandatory legislated standards and can be based on self-assessment or benchmarking. To monitor best practices and benchmark performance, we can offer you pre-made 'templates' to standardize project process documentation, which can be used in reporting, monitoring & evaluation purposes later on.