Funding is a core requirement for development to take place. Funding is the fuel, which makes the 
vehicle of development move forward. Development aid is generally allocated by the respective country budgets of bilateral donor countries. All major donor countries are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Each country allocates funding to its bilateral budgets and contributions to multilateral donor organisations. Therefore, in essence, aid for development is generated from the public of donor countries. However, this is not the same in the case of funding from corporates, where part of the profit is allocated for corporate social responsibility (CSR).
Is just receiving money all there is to it?
Most people think that resource mobilisation is just about raising funds, trying to obtain cash from donors. But, is that all there is to it? How can we just obtain cash from donors when there are so many problems in the world, which increases the demand for aid, and there’s clever competition from organisations similar to ours?
Modern-day fundraisers have to see what they do in a much broader perspective than just accessing financial grants from donors. Resource mobilisation might be a better term to use as this then takes into account resources necessary to implement projects and not just only the money. What other resources are available to be mobilised? Broadly speaking, this could mean technical expertise, products and services necessary to implement development and humanitarian programmes. Before you mobilise non-financial resources, make sure you are in front of as many donors as possible. Not putting all your eggs in one basket, so to speak.
Diversifying your sources of funding
During a donor mapping exercise at a recent training, I requested the participants to write down all of their existing donors and potential donors on flashcards. The participants were from an established large non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Asia and came up with an impressive number of flash cards with different donors. The next step was to cluster these cards under categories, which revealed two things.
The broad categories were multilateral, bilateral, embassies, trusts and foundations, individual (public), International non-governmental organisations (INGOs), high-net-worth individuals, corporates, international service organisations and government.
Firstly, they were a little unsure about where to place some donors, indicating that there was a lack of knowledge about differentiating donors based on their characteristics – for example, where to place the European Union (EU) and CARE International – under bilateral, multilateral or INGOs? Secondly, certain categories were almost empty, indicating that not all potential donors were tapped.
It’s important to have a brief look at how the concept of development and aid emerged and has evolved over the years before identifying and approaching your potential donors.
What is international development and how did it come about?
The concept of foreign assistance can be traced back to the founding of the Red Cross in 1863 by Swiss businessman Henry Dunant. However, a good place to start talking about foreign aid (FA) is the end of World War II (WWII). Europe was destroyed and the USA prepared a plan to assist in the rebuilding process. The Marshal Plan was implemented to rebuild Europe and Japan. The UN and the Bretton Woods Institutions were also established in the early years of the post-WWII period.
Through the successful jumpstart from the Marshal Plan, Europe and Japan grew steadily to become ‘developed countries’. The concept of foreign aid was sustained in global forums and evolved over the years. With the beginning of the Cold War, FA was politicised. Aid was provided strategically to selected countries and locations.
Different United Nations (UN) agencies, development organisations, I/NGOs and interest groups emerged during the period 1950-1990. Although the initial intentions of providing FA were limited to the economic development of countries and regions, they gradually evolved to include social, cultural, political and environmental aspects.
The UN in its unique inter-governmental role, declared International Development Decades dedicated to themes of global relevance and importance. The Nations Encyclopaedia website explains, “The first UN Development Decade was launched by the General Assembly in December 1961. It called on all member states to intensify their efforts to mobilize support for measures required to accelerate progress toward self-sustaining economic growth and social advancement in the developing countries.”
The 1990s saw more changes in the development discourse where scholars such as Amartya Sen presented ideas on human development and the capabilities approach, and also, the UN started publishing the Human Development Reports with Mahbub Ul Haq’s initiative.
As per the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) official Human Development Reports (HDR) website, “Human development – or the human development approach – is about expanding the richness of human life, rather than simply the richness of the economy in which human beings live. It is an approach that is focused on people and their opportunities and choices.”
In any case, development has now become a global industry. Three motives can be presented to answer the question ‘What drives countries to give foreign aid?’
Moral – the genuine human instinct to help other living beings in need
Security – poverty and unmet basic needs of humans, creates and escalates unrest
Economic – natural and human resources are spread across the globe; access to these, and the markets for the end products, are easily accessible if people are happy
Development and aid have been equally praised and criticised. This global debate calls for the critical analysis of the processes and outcomes of aid, both at the macro level and the micro level, in countries to ensure effectiveness of development aid. Paul Mosely is credited in 1987 for identifying a micro-macro paradox in international aid: at the micro level, development project evaluations show a positive picture whereas, statistical analysis at the macro level shows a different picture.
However, by now, multiple objectives are fulfilled by development aid. Developing countries need aid to fill the critical gap in the financial resources they need to make an adequate level of investment, in order to achieve reasonably high rates of growth. They also need the aid to acquire the technology and know-how required for development.
So, where do you start?
First, start using the word resource mobilisation (RM) rather than simply saying fundraising. This will allow you and the others in the organisation to diversify your donor base by accepting that money is just one resource for development projects.
It always helps to have dedicated staff for RM rather than adding this responsibility as one key performance indicator (KPI) into the job description (JD) of an existing staff member who already has other duties. Having said that, it also has to be made understood, organisation-wide, that RM is the responsibility of all staff members to varying degrees. Everyone can, and has, to contribute.
There’s a significant role, for example, which the communications department has to fulfil in view of documenting and disseminating research documents that highlight the needs and success stories to highlight achievements. The same goes for the programme managers and technical specialists. They have to work very closely and contribute to prepare proposals and presentations to donors.
The link with the human resource (HR) department is one that may be easily overlooked. But timely recruitments of qualified professionals for donor-funded projects of limited duration, for example, emergency response projects to assist communities affected by disasters, is crucial to completing the project successfully. The same goes for information and communications technology (ICT) and procurement. These support services are essential to complete projects successfully and retain donors. The dedicated RM staff have to be responsible for implementing the RM Cycle within the organisation. They have to make the other colleagues aware of the cycle and invite their respective expertise at each stage as required. The RM Cycle has seven steps and starts with identifying the needs for resources. The final step is to evaluate the RM process, which helps in continuing the process and cycle.
In terms of resources other than direct funding, there are donors offering a variety of other useful resources. Non-traditional donors are both in terms of financial grants from new donors, as well as emerging economies such as Korea and the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China), and donors who could help you to answer the following questions: What if you could have certain expertise and specialists in your organisation to handle communications, or say, a gender project, without salaries? What could you do to reduce expenditure on expensive software for your laptops? What if your annual audit was done free of charge? How do you build the capacity of the local government to help communities to improve the agricultural yield? What could you do to ensure that the school building, which your organisation built, is maintained well? Or, how could you reduce the cost of constructing a school building? How can you obtain and transport the medical goods and drugs that you need for a flood-affected community?
You have to understand about non-traditional donors, who they are and how to access these resources, through organisational and RM-specific strategies.
Devising RM strategies and importance of partnerships
Devising RM strategies is the third step of the RM Cycle. This is where you identify your potential donors and prepare to access their resources on offer. It’s a good idea to identify and list down all potential donors, right at the beginning. The top donors can then be prioritised through an initial screening. This screening can be a quick scan of their websites to see if the donor’s objectives and mandate are a good match with the objectives of your organisation.
You can do a more detailed analysis once you have a list of at least five to seven donors. The aim here is to get a deeper understanding of the donor’s interests, sectors, thematic areas of intervention and strategies. All donors have time-bound strategic plans, which are global as well as country-specific. Most strategic plans are for five years but could be more, like in the case of the EU, which is seven years.
Categorising the donors allows you to put in place strategies aligned with their visions, missions and objectives. Thus, the process may seem like donors are being stereotyped but, it helps to customise your approach. Although collectively identified as institutional donors and the way you approach them could be similar, the funding objectives of a bilateral donor can be different to that of a multilateral donor.
The strategy to approach and engage with an institutional donor cannot obviously be the same as for a corporate donor or a high-net-worth individual. For instance, in this example, the first type of donor will be interested in how your project fits into the host-government’s poverty reduction priorities, whereas the second and third types might be looking at, respectively, the triple bottom line and an emotional feeling of personal satisfaction.
Partnerships have to be with donors as well as with your competition. Some donors, such as DIPECHO, specifically request INGOs and civil society partners to apply for funding in consortiums. Organisations, which may be seen as competitors for funding since their target groups are the same, for example, Save the Children and Plan International, which work with children, may then have to work together to access such resource envelopes.
Where appropriate, it’s also a win-win situation if you are able to strike a deal with another resource-recipient to become an implementing partner of a project for which they received funding. You may need to reciprocate by involving them in one of your projects, where appropriate, in order to make such partnerships successful.
Your organisation also needs some sort of specialisation to be successful in this, say for example, specialisation in certain thematic areas (gender, climate change, etc.), geographic location (ex: field office in a remote area) or existing relationship with a marginalised group (ex: war-widows) through a current or past project.
(Asanga U. Ranasinghe is a consultant and trainer with more than 12 years of experience in the international development sector. He has worked for several leading international organisations, including the United Nations system. As an international development professional, he has successfully supported his employers with designing and implementing projects, increasing funding portfolios, organisational development and staff capacity building, monitoring and evaluation, marketing and communication and donor liaisons. He currently works for an international consulting and training group as a senior international consultant and trainer. The views do not necessarily reflect that of the employer)x
