Finding funding online

I recently gave a fundraising workshop to a group hoping to launch an organisation for young people with an interest in the sciences called Young Royals. In discussing development project fundraising, I drew on the example of a campaign I have been involved with for over a year – Ikhaya Losizo .

This is a fundraising initiative whereby Rhodes University students “either as individuals or as clubs, societies or residences raise funds”. All the money raised is donated to Child & Family Welfare in Grahamstown for the express purpose of building a local safe house for abused and neglected children.

Amazingly, this campus-based campaign reached its proposed target of R200 000 – a hefty amount from youth who supposedly hold no interest for such campaigns.

In advising the eager Young Royals group, my fellow Ikhaya Losizo committee member, Dominique Schafer and I presented a possible recipe for success. This included a discussion of the importance of tight branding and advertising of a new campaign, and among other things – the advantage of having a website.

I then realised that for all my earlier discussion on funding, I had failed to draw on my own very personal example where ICTs have aided development in my own experience. The Ikhaya Losizo website turned out to be a real asset to our campaign: it gave the project a legitimacy which meant our donors felt more comfortable that they were donating to an identifiable, verifiable cause. And most significantly: we attracted an anonymous donor in the U.K. wanting to donate R50 000 to our cause.

Without the website, this would never have happened. The donor says he was simply running an internet search for South African fundraising projects, looking for a worthy cause to which he could donate when he stumbled upon Ikhaya Losizo. I ran a Google search for “fundraising projects South Africa”, and I didn’t come up with Ikhaya Losizo within even the top ten pages.

Apparently this anonymous donor ran a search for “fundraising projects Grahamstown”, because then Ikhaya Losizo appears as the top hit. This means the donor must have been looking specifically in this area of South Africa for one reason or another.

If you consider the vast number of projects needing funding in South Africa, Ikhaya Losizo was extremely lucky to attract this donor. So are there sites in South Africa which act as portals connecting needy causes with prospective donors? Are there ways to leave it up to more than luck?

The Funding Site is one such example which “aims to support the development of an effective social capital market by providing a social broking and information service”. The site helps NGOs in accessing social capital and other resources through its searchable online database of prospective donors and its comprehensive range of information, training, advertising and marketing services to the South African non-profit and development community.

Downes Murray International is a South African company fundraising consultancy company working to help organisations from another angle altogether. They are employed by organisations to:
• assess funding needs
• examine and identify the potential of the constituency to meet those needs
• design and implement a tailored programme to raise the required money
• provide training where necessary
• analyse results
• guide and advise in whatever areas may be necessary for the successful continuation of the programme.

Yet I failed to find any sites acting as a database of South African projects where potential donors such as Mr Anonymous in the UK could look for a worthy project like Ikhaya Losizo. Perhaps this is an important way in which ICTs could help aid development: through working harder to connect donors with those organisations needing their help. A database with a list and description of various projects in South Africa is an excellent idea. Anyone up for the challenge of creating one?