Does the project fit your organisation?

This area of the site was written for very experienced trust fundraisers.

I’ve seen projects fail to secure funding that were in a very different area of work. You can see why. Why not just fund a charity in that same field? Would it really be such a good quality piece of work when managed by a much less experienced organisation? Often these outlier projects are being championed by just one person in the organisation, what would happen if they left?

In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen identifies a number of areas where innovations can fail to fit into the charity:

• Resources to make the work happen. Your grant may not be putting everything in that is needed to support that project to deliver – at senior management level, if nowhere else.
• Values of the organisation. A great example of this was at a big care charity where I worked, they tried to introduce a much more entrepreneurial, customer-centric, bespoke service. The charity had the wrong values to be taking the decision it needed to and so the service struggled.
• Processes. Again, at another charity that was very used to just doing the same thing all the time, when big new innovation was needed, nothing was set up to deliver it.