Connecting Donors with Funding Opportunities & Community Needs
SidneySuttles
Posts: 15 ✭✭✭
We are a state-wide community foundation and are frequently contacted by organizations and municipalities throughout the state who have funding needs and have questions about what opportunities our CF offers. In some cases, our community funds or grant programs can meet these needs, but many times we don't have a program in place. We have donor advised fund holders throughout the state that might be interested, but we haven't found a good way to capture what their funding interests are (and if they are even open to being contacted about needs in their interest area or their geographical area). We did send out a survey to all DAF holders last year, but only got about 10 responses.
How does your community foundation track ongoing needs as they are brought to you? Are you using a functionality in CSuite, a spreadsheet, or some other software? How do you connect your constituents (particular donor advised fund holders) with said opportunities and how do you track their funding interests?
Any insight would be much appreciated!
Comments
We are also looking for a better solution to this problem. Right now we have 2 spreadsheets - one has funding requests that come in via a google form and the other spreadsheet has our various funds listed with the amount available and notes on what they are looking to fund/their priorities. I will often review our requests and look through our available funds spreadsheet to see if anything can align. But honestly, a lot of DAFs are just general knowledge that some of the staff have in their heads, so when we have our weekly meeting someone may suggest a specific DAF.