Fundraising? We’re here to help.
When we wrote our first white paper, Making Money for Impact, we wanted to guide social change businesses and organizations on how to make their institutions more sustainable and impactful. But a lot of first-time entrepreneurs asked us to take a step back and start from the very beginning. They wanted to understand how people get money to start mission-driven organizations and companies in the first place.
While there’s tons of content about startup financing, there are fewer resources directed toward social entrepreneurs raising capital. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing a series of posts, and later this spring releasing a white paper aimed at answering your questions. We’ll be demystifying the process of fundraising and showing you that there are more ways than you think to get your world-changing idea up and running.
We want to make sure we’re addressing your most challenging fundraising questions, so speak up in the comments section or use this google form to tell us:
- What have you always wanted to know about fundraising, but were afraid to ask?
- Where do you see the most obstacles, challenges, and unnecessary roadblocks?
- What tools and resources have inspired you or helped build your fundraising muscles?
- What do you wish someone had explained about raising money?
This is your chance to ask us everything you wanted to know about fundraising best practices and tricks of the trade. So go on, send us a note, and we promise we’ll divulge as much as we’re able.
In the meantime, we thought we’d share some interesting trends that we’ve been watching and that might inspire you:
- Unicorns are glorified as THE end goal. But they’re extremely rare, and we think thoroughbreds may make better investments in the long term. You can read more about our perspective here. We also love this essay Sex & Startups and follow-up Zebra Manifesto by Jenn Brandel and Mara Zepeda about a new model for startup success.
- We love seeing innovators getting innovative about fundraising. From Quorum’s creative bootstrapping through business plan competitions to non-profits raising funding in rounds, fundraising is not a one size fits all process — and it’s ripe for disruption.
- Financiers are getting creative, too. Our friends at Transform Finance are, as their name suggests, transforming the impact investment field through non-extractive financing. Folks at the LIFT Force for Good Fund are crowdfunding capital for social change companies run by women and people of color. The Impact Terms Project offers practical advice (and examples) on incorporating mission protection, and alternative exit paths for deals. And we suspect that there’s much more that we don’t even know about. Do you know of any great examples of creative financiers? Share them with us in the comments!
We’ve also written some posts in the past that can be helpful as you’re starting out. Read advice on how to get your startup funded, about improving your pitch, and our unofficial guide to fundraising.
And don’t forget to share your questions about the fundraising process!
