Strategy Reviews and
Development Audits

Is your fundraising working?

Whatever your fundraising ambitions, you need to have a strategy that details your goals, identifies key actions and provides a clear route to success. Over time or in response to changing circumstances, the plan you adopt will inevitably need to be reviewed and refreshed.

A Gifted Strategic Review or Development Audit helps you take stock and adapt your approach so that you can continue to meet your fundraising goals. This includes recommending important actions to take and what resources you’ll need along the way. It provides not just the basis for your ongoing fundraising activity, but the platform for your board to decide how much investment will be required to make things happen.

Key Benefits

Guides you in generating additional income when your business plan may be changing or there are new projects and programmes about to come on stream
Helps you identify whether any existing income can be reduced or even withdrawn altogether
Supports you at a time when leadership or management is going through a period of change
Helps you to understand how to best develop your income streams
Provides insight on tackling declining donor retention which may be because your strategy hasn’t been reviewed for some years

Key questions when reviewing your fundraising strategy:

1. Where are we now? Position audit
A review of the charity’s current fundraising activities over the last three years including a comprehensive SWOT analysis.

2. What are others doing? Key learnings research
A summary of the findings generated from research into comparator, benchmark and competitor charities.

3. Where do we want to be? Stakeholder research
An outline case for support for the charity and its wider fundraising operation would be prepared and tested with internal stakeholders. Focus groups to be held with internal teams.

4. Where is the money? Resources review
Validation of the case for support with selected prospects across the region and the UK, including gift evaluation and volunteer leadership identification.

5. Where are we going? Options appraisal
Develop the recommendations for the 3 to 5-year Charity Strategy including outline income and expenditure projections, key audiences and timeframes, risks, staff resource etc.

6. How do we get there? Fundraising strategy
Finalise and present the Fundraising Strategy to Trustees and SLT.

Watch now

A written fundraising strategy is a dynamic document. It isn’t produced so that it can sit on the shelf and gather dust. It will naturally evolve to reflect successes and failures, manage changes in external influences and meet new challenges.

"We appointed Gifted to help us with some strategic planning and to understand how we might better serve and communicate with our supporters. The work Gifted has completed for us has given us real clarity and confidence for the way forward - we now have a direct plan for both the short and medium-long term, with realistic and achievable goals. We are sure that the deliverable recommendations in the report Gifted produced will have a huge benefit to us as we grow the charity over the coming years"

Amy Heritage
Director of Marketing and Communications, akt, national LGBTQ+ youth homelessness charity

"The Kennel Club Charitable Trust is an established charity of over 30 years, but we have never had a proactive fundraising operation. We engaged Gifted to undertake a Strategic Review, creating an action plan for how we progress. Since then, we’ve been implementing the Fundraising Strategy with Gifted’s help and have seen our charity thrive - we are so excited for what the future holds for us and our increased ability in fulfilling our vision of making a difference for dogs."

The Reverend Bill King
Former Chairman of Trustees, The Kennel Club Charitable Trust

The key elements of a fundraising strategy

Whilst every fundraising strategy is unique to the organisation it serves, they all share some common elements, including:

A complete strategy should recognise all three needs in the fundraising mix and deliver the best plan to raise funds, as and when appropriate, for each of them.