Our Big Plan for Fundraising
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Document Structure
This document is rapidly heading towards becoming an instruction manual. It would work better as a set of Wiki pages. That would be just as easy to work on in a community driven effort.

About Fundraising

The essence of fundraising is that it is storytelling.

We present a story to funders which they can support and engage with, and in exchange they will feel moved to give us some of their funds to help us to further some elements of that story.
Carefully crafted communication is the essence of this storytelling process. We need carefully define and design how we communicate, what we communicate and when is the best time to communicate.

The how, what and when of communication are different for each of our potential donors so we also need to carefully research and define our donor communities and adapt our communication to match donor needs.

Content

Communications content can be expressed in four dimensions:

• We need to communicate an aspirational life story for the organisation. This will normally be expressed as a Strategic Plan, with a Vision, Mission and many projects. The Vision will express the difference we want to make in the world and is very important for capturing the attention and empathy of the funder.
• We need to constantly communicate a buzz of activity and progress. Donors want to know that they are supporting an exciting living project and that their contribution is contributing to improving that life.
• We need to communicate our integrity, as trust is an important part of believing in the value of contributing to the project. We need to agree and stay on message at all times. We need to be consistently truth based and admit candidly what we don’t know.
• We need to communicate a ‘professional’ image, which is complex but contains a message about having the capability to operate the organisation well, to do the right things and do them in the right way.

All of the four dimensions of communication are closely linked to the operations of the foundation, to the extent that if the underlying operations are flawed, the operational problems will undermine the communications message. We must aim at consistently good operational practise which will lead to a virtuous cycle of good communications and increased funding.

Communicate with Donors

All communication is directed at donors. Donors to OSM come in all forms, but a primary divide is donors of time and donors of funds and services.

Donors of time

Mappers give of their time to add data, to process that data, to publish that data. Administrators creators, developers and organisers give of their time to build the volunteer base and to run the foundation.
Volunteer organisation and time donation is very important, and requires a package of targeted communication, but it is a different topic to fundraising so there will be no more discussion of time donors in this document.

Donors of funds and services

We are concentrating on donors of funds and donors of ‘in kind’ commercial services. These donors can be roughly classified according to the scale of their donations.

Individual donors give small amounts, from ten to a thousand Euro, biased towards the smaller amounts. This includes OSM mappers who decide to support the project financially, OSMF Members who contribute annual membership fees and occasionally generous OSM map users and data users.

Corporate donors give from €750 to €30,000 annually, and can donate additional amounts. They are the major source of OSMF income at this time. Corporate donors are currently entirely drawn from corporations who are direct users of the OSM map data.

Detail: Other corporates not active in mapping may still be tapped to give support. We currently have very large mission critical corporate “in kind” donations for the Content Delivery Network and for the use of satellite images as the basis of geodata capture.

Institutional donors, being mainly trusts and foundations, are not significant donors to the OSMF at this time. OSMF received one $250 000 donation from the Pineapple fund in 2017. There are potentially large untapped sums available in this category.

Detail: The initial work involves sifting through thousands of institutions to find the few that are closely aligned with our goals. Networking to build relationships is highly effective in this environment. Once a relationship is in place it needs to be consistently maintained.

Government donors, being international, national or regional organisations, are very rarely donors despite being known to use OSM data. One known obstacle is that governments do not have systems to deal with free software so even willing governmental users can't process payments.

Detail: Selling pitches need to be adapted to fit within standard government procurement processes. Bureaucracies have intractable systems and need to work with known goods. Commercial software procurement deals with licences by year or by seat, copious legal documentation, contract signing, competitive tendering and quotations and formal invoices. It is possible to create all of these unnecessary artifacts to fit OSM into a government procurement system.

Sub-Classes
The four donor classes above can be further divided into smaller sub-classes to allow for a tightly focused donor engagement strategy at the sub-class level. The most obvious subclass is language, where there is benefit to set up specialised teams to work in non-English languages. German and French are candidates.

The Fundraising Process in Seven Steps

Recruiting and managing donors shares both activities and vocabulary with managing sales but it is traditional for fundraisers to avoid seeing or describing the process as selling.
Borrowing from sales, here are seven steps of fundraising.

1. Prospecting
   Conduct research to develop a comprehensive list of possible donors. Screen and rank them by standard criteria to identify the most likely prospective donors. Criteria may include a cost-benefit analysis to elevate high benefit and low cost prospects.

2. Preparation
   Gather more information on selected prospective donors and use that information to adapt a standard pitch template to more closely suit their interests. Research possible introductions via business networks.

3. Approach
   Contact the candidate donor and work to build interest in engaging about donating. Make an appointment.

4. Presentation
   Make the donation pitch concisely and in terms well adapted to suit each prospective donor. If possible work with the donor’s team in advance to craft a proposal around a project or other aspect close to the donor’s needs.

5. Queries and exploration
   The candidate has accepted the pitch and now may want to explore options in donation, or may propose alternative approaches like donation in kind or buying a specific deliverable.

6. Closing
   The candidate agrees to make the donation. The administrative steps for payment are concluded.

7. Follow-up
   This phase continues indefinitely. It involves maintaining and building a relationship or partnership with confirmed donors, continually gathering further information to know the donors better and occasionally working to see if the level of donation can be increased.
   Follow-up work includes the work of the Advisory Board which maintains ongoing relationships with corporate donors.

Other donors: Grants

Grants are a short term funding source from a Grantor that has no possibility of longer term funding stream. Grantors, unlike other donors, do not require to be communicated with in an intensive way. Grantors can have quite onerous requirements for reporting on the use of their funds, which can reduce their cost-benefit value.

Grants can sometimes be a good source of funds for specific projects. Application for a grant requires preparation of documents specific to each grant. It is useful to have a big resource of communications material available as a template or generic application to describe the activities of the OSMF and to describe how the grant funds could be used.

Grants can also be sourced on behalf of OSM-adjacent developers, where the funds can be used to improve free and opens source software (FOSS) resources that support OSM activities.

Projects and Priorities

A typical donor will want to know what the projects and priorities of the Foundation are, and how they are determined.

Our projects and priorities are guided by:

• The needs of our data user community.
• The needs of our data provider community.
• The needs of the infrastructure and IT services we provide.
• The needs of the Foundation for administration, legal compliance and operations.

Each of the above needs unpack into a set of projects designed to realise the needs.

In addition, financial security is important, so building up an endowment to cushion the Foundation against financial shocks is a fundable project.

Making this Happen 1: The Fundraising Team

The OSM Foundation needs to recruit a small team with a mix of research, admin, communication and people skills to do the tasks in the seven stages above.

The current Fundraising Advisors are a critical resource for support and advice but most have little free time so a core of volunteers with both time and enthusism for the work maybe be required.

Actions

Preliminary work on putting a fundraising team in place would include better specifying the tasks required for each stage and setting up the ongoing background work.
Background work includes packaging financial and project progress reporting and managing the database tools to be used to hold contact and tracking data on donors – possibly CiviCRM can be used.

Making this Happen 2: The Grants Team

The Grants team will identify prospective grants and evaluate them. They may hand them off to OSM adjacent developers, or decide to apply for a grant for an OSMF internal project.

The Grants team will monitor grant making organisations, the OSM network and the Internet generally for opportunities to apply for grant funding.
The team will prepare applications from stored communications material and details of a suitable OSM project. If successful, the project is started and managed to completion, with all required feedback to the grantor.

Actions

A few volunteers from technical parts of the Foundation (EWG, OPS, Data) are assigned to monitor the Internet for grant opportunities. Identified grants are then reviewed and good prospects are processed by the Grants team as an application for the grant. It is expected that more applications will fail than will succeed.
Successful applications become a project, executed in most cases by paid contractors. The project will follow a standard project execution path, ending in a final impact assessment report.

Making this Happen 3: OSMF Operational Requirements

The Fundraising process would need to reflect in its communications that the OSM project is running well, and that the Foundation has a number of important attributes. These attributes include the following:

• The Board publishes a Vision statement. This is different and complementary to a Mission Statement which is the only high level statement available at the moment. A Vision is a necessary aspirational statement to share with donors. A Mission describes the work needed to achieve the Vision.
• The Board publishes regular activity reports, demonstrating that the project is alive and active and achieving its objectives. It is suggested to do this quarterly, and to include project delivery reports, data statistics, board reports, finncial reports and anecdotal news about OSM. Quality of reporting is an important tool for making a good impression.
• The board demonstrates integrity. This would include ethical standards, certain codes of practices like moderation and impartiality, and all financial codes of practice and controls. Hiring practices and procurement practices should also be of high integrity. Integrity must be visible.
• The Board demonstrates professionalism. While professionalism is hard to define it is readily observed. The organisation should be seen to have good systems for planning and budgeting, as well as well designed and well implemented operational systems and standards. Projects should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, timebound. It should deliver its primary product well. It should be able to respond rapidly and correctly to any crisis. It should understand and effectively manage risk. It should be well resourced with clearly capable people.

Actions

The Board needs to take stock of its image and identify any gaps in the above attributes. Where gaps are found the task is to rapidly put in place necessary systems and resources to build the reputation of the organisation.

ENDS