Capital Fundraising Campaign and Charitable Foundations
Fundraising Charitable Foundations Cont’d
Part 22
In our last fundraising management discussion we focused on continuing a fundraising campaign engaging charitable foundations as a source of funding.
There are a number of websites providing a list of charitable foundations, which may be of interest to you. Many of the charitable foundations contained in these lists will likely have a website where you can investigate the foundation and their areas of funding interest.
While reviewing the charitable fund raising website make a list of the directors and check on the Internet to see if they are involved with other charities as well. If they are involved with other charities examine the areas of interest for funding of each charity. It is quite possible that one of these other charities may be of more interest in providing funding for your particular project.
There are websites services, which list charitable foundations and charge a fee to access these lists. Some of these database services will allow for a quick overview of most charitable foundations as well as do a search for the Board of Directors and their various portfolios with other charitable foundations.
Most frequently the database provided by these companies will also provide information as to which charitable organizations had been funded by the particular charitable foundation you are considering asking for money. The database will contain the amount of money given to each organization and the date that the organization received the funding. This can be very helpful in ascertaining whether or not this is a viable organization to approach.
Quite a bit of time has been invested to create a database that provides the kind of research information required by charitable organizations. For that reason, these organizations charge an annual fee to access the database containing thousands of names of charitable foundations. The strength of these databases is found in the relationship between various charitable foundations, directors, funding focus and search capabilities.
All charitable foundations must submit a tax return to the federal government. By going on the federal government website one can navigate their way to find the tax return of any charitable foundation. Accessing the federal government website to research charitable foundations is accurate and tedious.
While this is simply an overview, it should help get you started on your journey acquiring funding from charitable foundations.
Well, that’s the way I see it!
Monty McKinnon
Master Financial Planning Services Inc.