“Where do we go from here?” The second step in building your fundraising strategy

"Where do we go from here?" Bobby Womack This is the second of three short blogs based on, but by no means doing justice to, the 200 page book on Fundraising Strategy for DSC, which I co-wrote with Dr Claire Routley. In a recent blog, I looked at how we can understand where we are now (if you haven’t read that yet, do check it out and then come back to read this one – I’ll still be here). In musical lyrics terms, we’ve moved on from David Bowie to Bobby Womack: this second blog is about where you want to get to with your fundraising strategy.  Because having focused on understanding the state of play internally and externally for your organisation’s fundraising, you’re hopefully now armed with the insight and information you need to think about your fundraising objectives and audiences.  How do you set carefully thought through overall objectives for your fundraising? I would recommend going back to the SWOT analysis you did earlier (having been inspired by the first blog!) and consider these questions:  How can we use the strengths we identified to take advantage of our opportunities and avoid threats? How can we minimise weaknesses so that might prevent us doing so? How might ensuing objectives inter-relate, or are any of them overarching objectives? In what order of priority would we put them?  It has become a bit of a planning cliché, but still needs to be said: it’s important to make sure that our o