FIND FUNDING FASTER: OUR Fundraising Playbook is Now YOURS (Part 1)

We spill the secrets from our fundraising playbook for impact businesses & nonprofits. Capital allocators: send this to your favorite innovators so they can fundraise without losing their marbles.

Dec 09, 2023

Dear Green Innovators,

In this fifth edition of Find Funding Faster, steal Part 1 of our Fundraising Playbook so you can secure capital for your impact work faster. I know this issue is barely making the Friday deadline (it’s 11:25 pm EST)! But it took a while to write it, so I do hope you find it immensely useful.

What if you don’t use a fundraising playbook?

You end up chasing funding that isn’t a good fit or knocking on the wrong doors only to be rejected.
You waste a lot of time on funders who just aren’t that into your work.
You feel you’re on the Funding Hamster Wheel, and you can never get off even if you’re so dizzy you want to throw up.

Don’t use ours. Use someone else’s playbook, if you prefer. But avoid winging it (unless you’re Adam Newmann, then all bets are off!).

I’ve seen too many great innovators give up because they didn’t realize how hard it would be to raise money till they were in too deep.

There are 4 Plays in the Find Funding Faster Playbook:

Play #1: Create and update a central repository to track all the grants, investors, and other funding opportunities. We will cover this in this first issue of our series, and share our Funder Discovery Worksheet with you.
Play #2: Prioritize which ones are worth pursuing. We will cover this in greater detail in the second issue in this series (coming out next Friday).
Play #3: Make sure all deadlines are met without chaos or overwhelm. This will be the third in the series, two weeks from today.
Play #4: Analyze the wins and losses, and recalibrate the strategy accordingly. We will dive into this in the fourth issue, so stay tuned!

Capital allocator? I’ve talked two amazing founders off the ledge in the past two months because the fundraising process got too much. Be the mensch who boosts their chance of securing funding - whether you fund them or not.

Nonprofit or startup? This strategy playbook, if implemented, has the power to set into motion a financial flywheel. Of course, your vision, solution, team, and other core pillars must be solid. Assuming you have those in place, this playbook walks you step-by-step through the rest.

PLAY #1: IDENTIFY THE RIGHT FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES

It’s much easier to get a funder who is already interested in the market to care about your solution. It also takes them less time to make a decision because they understand the context.

These funders could be investors, foundations, philanthropists, donor advised funds, family offices, and government agencies who are deploying capital in your niche.

It does take work. But once you identify where the treasure is buried, you can decide where to start digging. That’s why I’m open sourcing the first worksheet in the Find Funding Faster Playbook.

All I ask is you don’t distribute it but direct others to this post so they have context before they use it.

The worksheet helps you think through all your best fit funding opportunities in one place. If you’ve already done this type of process, I would still urge you to do it again. You will always find a few new ones when you look at it with fresh eyes.

Here’s the link again:

FIND FUNDING FASTER
FUNDER DISCOVERY WORKSHEET

Subscribe now to receive the next play in the Find Funding Faster Fundraising Playbook by subscribing to our newsletter.

If you’re not raising money:

Use this Discovery Worksheet to come up with the strategic partners and collaborators who can help you with sales and marketing, or fill in gaps in your product or service delivery.

Filling out this worksheet for a client last week, we realized we could get a Google Adwords grant. That’s $10,000/month in free advertising on the largest search engine in the world, $120,000 per year for 10 minutes of work.

If you’re not interested in a specific type of capital allocator, you can totally skip over that section in the worksheet. For example, a new client told me just last week, that she would never go to a venture capitalist. She cannot offer ‘unicorn’ returns, so it just isn’t a good fit for her. We breezed past that section of the Discovery Worksheet.

If your organization is based in the US:

Check if you qualify for any of the climate dollars from the new Inflation Reduction Act by filling out this quiz. My colleague Jack Smoot will follow up with you if you do so you can add that to your Funder Discovery Worksheet.

The best way to summarize Play #1 is by quoting a new (old) friend I had a Zoom call with today:

“Know exactly who you are, know exactly what kind of capital you need, and know exactly who the capital providers are that give you that kind of capital. That’s it.”
Anthony Corsaro, Angel Investor and Host of the ReGen Brands podcast

PLAY #2: FIND A FUNDRAISING QUARTERBACK

Today, a startup founder I coached through the Magnetic Pitch Method said, “I need a Grant Quarterback!” I totally knew what he meant because even though I don’t know much about American football, I know this:

Without a great quarterback, it’s hard to win a game. And without someone filling the Fundraising Quarterback role, it’s hard (if not impossible) to scale your Fundraising Machine.

What does a Fundraising Quarterback do?

DISCOVER all the grants, prizes, investment capital, loans, and other funding opportunities your organization qualifies for.
PRIORITIZE the ones you are most likely to win.
Some quarterbacks LEAD the grant writing or pitching process, manage deadlines, and deliverables. But often, I advise a project manager do that because the last thing you want is for your quarterback to get lost in the weeds and drop the ball on the strategy.
RECALIBRATE based on results.

As an example, one of my clients wants to focus exclusively on grants this quarter, so here’s what we’ll do:

Go through all the government, foundation, and other opportunities their team has curated, and give them a HEAT score. My team will add a few more.
Prioritize via a monthly meeting which ones to apply for and assign the client’s grant writer to work on those.

IDENTIFY & MONITOR FUNDERS & OPPORTUNITIES

The Fundraising Quarterback (and typically a Virtual Assistant) continuously monitors various Slack, Discord, and Telegram channels, Google search, and a network of connections on LinkedIn and Twitter to update this database on a weekly basis. One of my ex-clients told me today in a LinkedIn chat that he learned about a perfect opportunity from a farmer acquaintance in North Dakota… Don’t underestimate the power of real human connection!

Discovery is not a one-and-done exercise. When we do it here at Impact Stars, we block off an hour a week to do this research for each client. This can be challenging if there just aren’t a lot of funding opportunities. For example, one regenerative company I’m working with on this needs a huge amount of CAPEX upfront. So we need to be very creative about finding the right funders who will not need smelling salts when they see the price tag. They need to see the vision and want to will it into existence as much as we do.

Share this newsletter if you feel so moved to do so!

Does this playbook work for startups?

I’ve seen many especially in the climate space bootstrap using grant funding in concert with investor capital. So if you don’t want to put all your eggs in one funding basket, I would fill out all the sections of the worksheet where you see non-dilutive funding opportunities. For example, Takachar has won the Earthshot Prize, the Breakthrough Fellows award, and many others, which has allowed them to get millions in non-dilutive money to fund their biochar startup.

The benefits of raising grant money for companies is:

You don’t give up any equity in exchange for these dollars
The grant money can cover expenses that investors will not fund
Unlike loans, you don’t need collateral or have to pay hefty interest rates

Case Study: Vesta

“Vesta also has a very unique corporate setup. They started their journey as a non-profit research group that has continued on as a 501(c)(3) called Coastal Carbon Capture Impact Fund. Vesta – the for-profit public benefit corporation that Tom is CEO of – emerged later as a way to pursue scaled commercial projects leveraging the non-profit research. And the two orgs continue to work together, though they have separate governance structures and economics.”

MCJ Interview with Tom Green, Vesta

Does this playbook work for nonprofits?

Yes. You can ignore the sections about investors.

Under partnerships, think about companies who could benefit by collaborating with you on grants. They need a 501c3 organization to accept funding and you can provide a service to them as long as it also furthers your mission.

So if you’re tired of always asking for money, and you’re ready to identify those who are looking to fund an innovation and an organization just like yours, dive in and see what you find. You may be surprised! Here’s the link again:

FIND FUNDING FASTER FUNDER DISCOVERY WORKSHEET

In next week’s issue, we’ll talk about prioritizing.

Whether you’re a company that needs funding or a nonprofit that requires philanthropic support to further its mission, there are sometimes way too many opportunities out there — each with their own onerous hoops you must jump through to win.

It can wipe you out if you’re talking to 100s of funders, filling out grant applications, and forms, and trying to keep track of it all in your head.

You need to cherry pick only the best fit funding partners for YOU at this moment in time. My superpower is to brutally delete the ones where the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

What’s your fundraising superpower? And what drives you crazy?

For example, Emily reached out to me and said she’s frustrated by the fact that there’s quite a bit of money for scientific research, but not for inter-disciplinary work that weaves science and indigenous wisdom together.

We only get to do what we do — because of what you do. So thank you!

Warmest,

Neesha Mirchandani

P.S.

Please unsubscribe if our memes are too corny for you! Dad jokes have nothing on us.

P.P.S.

Reply and tell us what your fundraising challenges are, and let’s see if we can help you or at least, point you in the right direction.

Only Because The Lawyers Made Us:

Impact Stars and its affiliates do not provide tax, legal, or accounting advice. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide, and should not be relied on for, tax, legal, or accounting advice. You should consult your own tax, legal, and accounting advisors before engaging in any transaction.

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Thanks for reading the Find Funding Faster: Impact Entrepreneur Edition published by Neesha Mirchandani, Founder & CEO of Impact Stars. If someone forwarded this issue to you, subscribe to Find Funding Faster (for free!) by entering your email address below to learn how to get capital for your climate, regenerative, or ocean innovation.