Philanthropy - Momentum Partnerships

28 March 2013 By Ulrike Leave a Comment

Mission Driven Fundraising & Social Marketing Campaigns

Mission driven fundraising refers to fundraising that is designed and implemented to promote the organisational mission. There are many misaligned fundraising initiatives solely focused on raising money and completely detached from the organisational mission – a topic for another time.

When fundraising and mission merge positive results are almost guaranteed – provided a good social marketing campaign is part of the strategy – no fundraising strategy can succeed if not enough people know about it – no matter how good it is.

Fundraising Overheads

Fundraising consumes an enormous amount of resources – money and time, often up to half of what is being raised. There has been much public discussion about the acceptable level of expenditure for fundraising campaigns as these resources, on the face of it, compete or are taken away from service delivery resources.

Headlines like “Charity Spends More on Fundraising than Research” don’t inspire public faith in charitable organisations and are regularly reported in the media. [Read more…]

8 March 2011 By Ulrike 1 Comment

“together we can change our world”

When most people think Girl Guides they probably don’t think of progressive girls and young women who play a significant advocacy role in local and global issues?

Well, think again everybody!

This is precisely what the 10 million members of the world’s largest volunteer organisation for girls and young women do, with memberships across 145 countries including Australia.

As their Global Action Theme, girls worldwide say: “Together we can change our world”. This theme is based on the Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s). An activity pack supports the curriculum and helps children and young women to learn about the MDG’s and, most importantly, to take action on the issues that affect them and their communities. [Read more…]

2 March 2011 By Ulrike 11 Comments

the girl effect

On the 8 March 2011 we are celebrating the centennary of International Women’s Day – a good occasion to remind us of the plight of girls around the world.

Did you realise that currently:

women work two-thirds of the world’s working hours, produce half the world’s food, and yet earn only 10 % of the world’s income and own less than 1% of the world’s property?
women make up 70% of the worlds 1.3 billion people who live in poverty?
women over the age of 15 in the least developed countries are twice as likely to be illiterate than men.

The solution? [Read more…]

23 November 2010 By Ulrike Leave a Comment

from social investment to social return on investment

a social enterprise????

I recently attended the inaugural ”Social Return Forum” put together by a colleague of mine, Oliver Wagg of New Climate for the 3 Pillars Network.

Concepts like social investment, social return on investment and a social investment market are much talked about lately by social investors, social entrepreneurs, those generating social profits and intermediaries alike and seem to have gone mainstream – and for good reasons:

We all want and need to know if our efforts are making a difference to the issues we are trying to address.

This evidence base to inform further investment has been missing in large parts of the social sector.

Evidence of social returns is instrumental for those investing funds in social issues and who are convincing others of the merit of these investment.

To state the obvious and track back a little – we are hungry for alternative approaches to welfare funding and need evidence about whether approaches work or not. [Read more…]