Fundraising: How foundations think

• Money is for solving problems
• Budget and general operating is not a motivating factor
• "Othering" is not good; foundations are peers
• two types of money: "living money" vs "dead money"
• foundations are more risk averse
• the power of program officers at foundations to get things done is almost exclusively to write checks.
• program officers want to push grantees into horizontal grants rather than their specific program area (so that it doesn't come out of their allocation)
• break up the interactions to interactions
  • The first interaction should be an offer to help the foundation
  • The second or third interaction should be about potentially asking for money
• fundraising from foundations is "sales"
• ask foundations about their strategy (because they love to talk about their strategy)
• business meeetings all have the same structure. Leverage the five minutes in the beginning of the meeting to get them to talk about themselves.
• engagement is in three phases: intellectual; creative; emotional
• cold calls are last resort; seek out warm introductions
• four ways to scope out opportunities
  • desk research
  • "who else should I talk to" over coffee
  • opportunistic
  • ???
• meeting foundations at conference
  • make sure you are interesting; don't try to get funded
  • get someone to say to themselves: "hmmm, that was interesting. how would that work?"
  • first rule of pitching: never pitch