Fundraising and Communication

Start the course by learning how to effectively market an impact initiative, project or organisation. Find out how to identify a target audience. Learn what motivates and moves your target audience and how to adapt your message to a specific audience to get the result you are after.

Find out how to make your messages compelling. Master the principles of persuasion and the basics of storytelling including the elements that make a strong narrative: characters, conflict and resolution. Explore which channels, traditional ones such as newspapers, radio, and television, or digital ones such as social media and messenger applications, would be the best place to share your message so that your key audience can receive it.

Learn when advocacy and the use of communication to create behavioral change is appropriate. Investigate the women’s rights movement, civil rights movement and environmental movement.. Design an advocacy strategy including short- and long-term objectives, a map of stakeholders’ positions and types of power, and clear messages designed to engage the government, the public, the private sector and the media.

Next, you’ll find out how to identify funding options and write a fundraising proposal. Deep dive into five different financial mechanisms: grants, microfinance, impact investing, challenge prizes and crowdfunding. Learn more about the three main sources of funding: government, private business, foundations. Discover the seven most common elements in a funding proposal read through successful and unsuccessful examples from other projects to learn how to put together a winning proposal.

Finally learn about the common challenges experienced when implementing impact: the level of uncertainty involved, distribution of capacity and knowledge, and uncertainty around project goals and how best to achieve them. Discuss the four major stages necessary in order to effectively manage one of these projects: analysis and initiation, design and planning, implementation and monitoring, closing and evaluation. Hear about projects that succeeded and failed, discussing common things that can go wrong and how to avoid them.

You’ll wrap up the learning of the above concepts by discussing all these theories in the context of real-life case studies, helping you to ground your understanding in the practical realities of fieldwork.