Why we chose grant writing

Charity Science was started as a test project with no specific plan on what the best methods for fundraising would be. After our research we chose grantwriting as the first area to test. We sometimes get questions or comments on: 

1) Why we chose grant writing 
2) Why we did not pick multiple methods of fundraising or test out different ways before investing six months into grant writing 
3) What areas would we expand into next


1) Why we chose grant writing

Below is what we see as the benefits of doing grant writing

• Grant writing yields some of the highest returns in fundraising, with grantwriting at 1:8 while the average is 1:3
• Grant writing is not location dependent 
• Grant writing does not require a charity to be well known or well established
  
• Grant makers seemed to care more about effectiveness than the other target groups
  
• Grant writing comparatively requires a much smaller time and money investment
  
• Grant writing is a relatively unexplored avenue by charities we were considering fundraising for
  
• Grant writing has very clear counterfactual impact as you can see where past donations went
  
• Grant writing would not take several years to see potential returns
  
• Grant makers are more willing to fund a diversity of charities, more so than other donor groups
  

2) Why we did not do multiple ways of fundraising or test out more different ways before investing 6 six months into grant writing.

We think that while the suggestion is intuitively appealing, it is not nearly as easy as we thought it would be before we researched it. Below I quickly go through what it would take to sufficiently test any fundraising strategy.


Door-to-door fundraising and street fundraising

• Both door-to-door and street fundraising require specific and different permits and registration that would take considerable time. Organizations tend to underestimate the time it takes to do things, particularly in operations
  
• Less well known charities are at a disadvantage in door-to-door or street fundraising
  
• It would be much harder to raise money for charities not registered in the country we are in
  
• There are legality issues to going door-to-door without being formally part of a charity 
  
• Doing testing without a license would either be illegal or not give the data we need because the vast majority of the gains from street fundraising are from the recurring donations, which often takes years to make worthwhile ratios
  
• Becoming good at door to door fundraising would not yield nearly as large returns as if you got good at a different type of fundraising (even if they were equal to start)
  
• We do not feel we could effectively test this method of fundraising in under a year
  

Corporate fundraising

• Corporate fundraising is described as the hardest type of fundraising to do
  
• Corporate fundraising has been described as taking many years to get good at
  
• Often corporations prefer to give in-kind (non-monetary) gifts which seemed harder for highly effective charities to work with in larger scale
  
• Often corporations prefer very conventional types of charities (this is fine for a charity such as AMF but quite devastating for a charity like THL)
  
• We do not feel we could effectively test corporate fundraising in under a year
  

Legacy fundraising

• Legacies offer the highest returns but are also the most difficult to test
  
• Legacies take several years, and sometimes decades to see returns
  
• Legacies are almost always pre-existing donors and require creating a relationship over a number of years 
  
• Legacies work best for charities with large pre-existing older donor pools. Our top charities both have younger demographics
  
• Calculating counterfactuals is much more difficult 
  
• Legacies are somewhat location dependent
  
• It is much harder to legacy fundraise if the fundraiser is young
  
• We do not feel we could effectively test legacy fundraising in under several years
  

Direct mail

• Direct mail takes considerable start-up time and lots of startup money 
  
• Direct mail takes a long time to see returns for the same reason as door-to-door; most of its money comes from recurring donations over several years
  
• Direct mail offers some of the worst fundraising ratios
  
• We do not feel we could effectively test direct mail fundraising in under six months
  

Online fundraising

• This can be done from anywhere and has a quick feedback loop
  
• There is a very untested type of fundraising with very little best practice established
  
• This seems like an avenue that would take time to get strong at
  
• This method would take much more money to test than grantwriting
  
• It would require some skills that we don’t currently have and would take a long time to acquire or be too expensive to outsource, given our current budget
  
• We do not feel we could effectively test online fundraising in under six months but are unsure how long it would take to test
  

High net worth fundraising

• High net worth fundraising takes time to create networks
  
• Calculating counterfactuals is much more difficult 
  
• It is location dependent
  
• Offers very mixed returns (high if you are good, low if you are bad)
  
• Often involves contacting preexisting donor networks
  
• We do not feel we could effectively test high net worth fundraising in under six months
  

We feel it would take around six months or more to test any one type of fundraising, and it seems like usable information would not be gathered from a 1 month short test. In general most fundraising takes time to get good at and works better if you put more time into it. We feel testing several methods would yield both weak and unreflective long term representations of all the types tested.


3) What areas would we expand into next

The most likely areas we would expand into next would be high net worth fundraising or online fundraising. Both of these we feel we could expect some feedback fairly quickly and there is already a pretty good avenue for possible pursuing online fundraising for animal rights., which we will write more about in an upcoming post.