Foundations often want to help their grantees grow in influence and effectiveness. Many grantees have excellent ideas and dynamic leaders but have difficulty in successfully growing their programs. Beyond making grants, how do you help such a group fund its mission? Plan for the future? Transition to a new executive director? Add organizational capacity? Achieve more impact? Foundations can play important roles in helping their grantees—beyond just providing financial support.
One of the Chiaroscuro Foundation’s partners was an innovative India-based nonprofit organization called Centre for Civil Society (CCS), which seeks to bring about social change through public policy. As a grantmaking foundation, Chiaroscuro saw a need for CCS to strengthen its organizational capacity through the creation of a more robust development program.
The foundation brought American Philanthropic on board to work with CCS’s leadership to create a multi-year development plan that evaluated where the organization stood, identified the most likely tactics for increasing donor revenue, integrated development work with the organization’s programming, and was appropriately scaled. American Philanthropic researched and profiled potential American, British, and European funding partners for CCS to approach. And we helped CCS begin to strengthen its brand in the U.S. through a series of events for opinion-shapers, media, and philanthropists.
As a result of the engagement, CCS’s new development director had a well-thought-out development plan to follow, and CCS had started to raise funds from, and build relationships with, dozens of newly identified donors and donor prospects.
American Philanthropic is registered as “fundraising counsel,” “fundraising consultants,” or other similar designations in all states requiring this kind of registration. We did not act as a “professional fundraiser” in the case cited above, meaning, among other things, that we did not at any time solicit funds, assets, or property on our client’s behalf.