Charites need funding. You will never hear a charity CEO say “No we’re good, fully funded to do all that we need to do, thanks”.
Charities are emotion driven organisations. They run on empathy. They start when a group of people see a need to change a bad situation affecting others. And so human stories, told compassionately, drive donations – surely that’s enough?
Stories are certainly the starting point. But for those people who are not there, seeing it in real life, stories alone are not enough. Numbers support the stories.
You Know You Make A Difference
It’s frustrating when you’re there doing it. You know it’s working. You see the impact you have every day. It’s exhausting enough doing the work.
And now you have to crunch the numbers for a usually anonymous funder who you suspect will barely read them. You might feel it’s a waste of time.
So How Do You Show Others The Difference You Are Making?
Numbers. Data. There is no getting away from it – it is one of the most important assets you have to gain funding.
The thing is, you do actually have the information. You may or may not store it in a way that makes it easy to summarise in a number. But if you’re doing the work, you have the data you need.
Keeping that data well should improve your work – it shouldn’t be bureaucracy for the sake of it. It should be the information you need (as an organisation) to do the work. And the numbers should then flow from there.
If your systems aren’t working for you, you can and should fix that.
Sometimes A Number Is Worth 1000 Words…
One charity we work with recently told us a story about their data. They had a simple report, drawing on data they’d been collecting for the previous year, that showed the increasing level of need in their area.
They showed it to the Local Authority.
Just on the basis of that data, they received an additional £50,000.
They already had a good track record of being able to meet those needs. But: no extra applications or new projects. Clear evidence, based on solid data – that was enough.
Now admittedly that’s a pretty rare story, especially at the moment. But sometimes we are so struck by a number it’s hard not to gasp.
One of those facts for me is this: the number of years separating us and the T-Rex, is less than the time from T-Rex to Stegosaurus. Those things that the ‘mind blown’ emoji was designed for, the first time you heard it.
A nice moment for us at Lamplight is when a new customer runs their first report with all the data from their organisation. Sometimes they’ve not been able to do that before – and are stunned at what comes out. When you’re there in the day-to-day, it’s easy to miss the big picture. They’d never seen before just how many people they work with, together, or the impact they’ve had combined.
Take a step back and look at what you do, and marvel at it – and find the number that expresses it.
… But Numbers Need Stories
Numbers without stories, without context, rarely move people. My mind-blowing dinosaur fact is only mind blowing because humans are not very good at big numbers. If I just told you how many million years ago those dinosaurs were around – I guess most people just shrug. But by relating it to me, then it becomes real.
What you do is about people, and what people respond to is other people. Make sure your numbers are shared in a way that keeps the human in it. Let the data prove your case studies and help secure future funding.
Photo by rh2010
