MSC Pushes the Envelope with New Fiscal Sponsor Fundraising Program

It’s not a secret: Raising money is hard. Nonprofits around the world dedicate countless hours and funds to writing grant proposals and chasing individual donors in hopes they see the slightest increase in their annual appeals. Fundraising requires professional staffers, time, and, ironically enough, money — all of which is unsurprisingly hard to come by for many organizations, especially fiscally sponsored projects in the movement building space. In fact, a 2023 report released by Social Impact Commons found that less than half of fiscal sponsors even provide fundraising support to their projects at all.

Here at Movement Strategy Center (MSC), we provide backbone support to movement building projects, which allows them to focus on their programmatic work at hand — but not fundraising. It comes as no surprise then that one of the top support requests MSC gets from our projects is for fundraising help. So, when MSC received a grant from the Clarence E. Heller Charitable Foundation to develop “enhanced services” for our projects in 2022 , it immediately became clear that providing in-depth fundraising support to increase their overall revenue was the task at hand.

Program Design and Implementation

Enter the Fundraising Task Force (FTF), a cross-departmental group of MSC staffers dedicated to using these newly-acquired funds to expand MSC’s service models to build immediate and long-term financial sustainability for our fiscally sponsored projects. Lauren Wheat, MSC’s Director of Business Operations and FTF member, knew immediately that “this grant was perfect to design a fundraising support program with, and not just for, our partners.” With this in mind, the team set out to co-design the program. 

From the beginning, the FTF planned to push the envelope. They wanted to help MSC’s projects and create a blueprint for other fiscal sponsors to follow. To do this, the team blended the values of Community-Centric Fundraising with MSC’s values:

• Fundraising must be grounded in race, equity, and social justice.
• The future can guide us; we are not constrained to the present or past.
• Everything gets done through relationships, and nothing gets done without them.
• We treat donors as partners.
• Embodiment is crucial to ensure that we have access to all the capacities we need.
• Commitment to practice and action.

With these foundational values and a commitment to co-designing the program in place, the FTF got to work. They held co-design workshops that offered stipends to participants and conducted surveys with projects. It became clear projects had a limited fundraising base, limited fundraising staff, and needed professionals to facilitate this work so they could focus on serving their communities. The FTF also began assessing the level of support each project needed. Gathering information such as available cash and monthly costs helped the team determine a need value — low, medium, or high — for each project so resources could be distributed equitably. MSC Project Advisor and FTF team lead Alejandra García Lezama noted, “the co-design process directly influenced elements of the program,” such as whether resources were to be divided equally or equitably, and the next step: finding and hiring fundraising consultants.

Two scopes of work were identified for projects to choose from: grant writing and individual giving; so the team needed consultants well versed in both to maximize support. In addition to expertise, the projects expressed a clear desire to work with values-aligned consultants who were willing to address their specific needs. The team narrowed an initial applicant list of 39 consultants down to four and brought them in to begin working with the projects.

Consultants and projects were paired up based on shared goals and began working together. As this work was underway, the FTF started hosting capacity building workshops centered around pitch writing and Community-Centric Fundraising. These workshops were aimed at deepening the relationships projects had with each other and with MSC, while setting them up for long-term fundraising success. A pivotal aspect of moving away from traditional fundraising models is reducing the reliance on quantitative results to promote the effectiveness of a program or organization, so the team at MSC worked hard to focus the program and its evaluations of effectiveness on qualitative results such as:

• Projects’ ability to fundraise in a way that was aligned with their values.
• Projects’ ability to find grant opportunities that align with their mission.
• How projects’ relationship with their consultant made them feel.
• Projects’ ability to exercise more power in funder relationships.

Results from the initial program have been positive. Ninety percent of participants would recommend this initiative, and the initial $150,000 grant from the Clarence E. Heller Charitable Foundation has already led to over $260,000 in funds won by participating organizations. As one project staffer shared, “this experience has reinforced my belief that MSC wants to see everyone win.” MSC is excited to continue developing this project with the Clarence E. Heller Charitable Foundation’s ongoing support and their recent renewal of the initial grant to MSC.

Looking Ahead

Proud of this program and its early results, members of the FTF attended the 2024 National Network of Fiscal Sponsors conference in Atlanta, Ga., this past October to present their work in the hopes that more fiscal sponsors implement similar programs. After sharing their story, the team was approached by Andrew Schulman, founder of Schulman Consulting, a well known consulting practice focused exclusively on fiscal sponsorship. He asked the team to present their work during one of his weekly Fiscal Sponsor Conversations. The FTF is excited to continue this work and share their learnings with the philanthropic industry with hopes of growing equitable fiscal sponsorship services for all.

Raising money will always be hard, so as an equitable intermediary working to provide movement leaders with transformational infrastructure, MSC and the FTF have a long road ahead. The beginnings of this program have shown incredible potential for this transformational work, and, as Wheat noted: “nobody was really doing this kind of hands-on support that we have started here, so we look forward to continuing.” If you’d like to learn more about the design, successes, challenges, and future of this program at MSC, we invite you to look out for our upcoming white paper, and stay up to date with MSC by subscribing to our newsletter here.