by Daniel Wolfe

I worked for an AIDS NGO before I became a donor, and there are many things about donors I wish I had known when I worked for an NGO. Perhaps the most important thing is understanding how donors think about what they do.

Donors have an ambivalent relation to other donors, but they usually like the “I will if you will” dynamic–where one donor will put in funds because they are reassured that another donor has also regarded the program positively.  At the same time, Donors also like taking sole credit for things and talking about their particular impact, so in many cases the best situation is one in which you, the NGO, are getting co-funding, but can also identify the “special” contribution a particular donor is making.

 

Donors also like to see you get support from other donors because it makes us feel like a project is less vulnerable if we change our minds, which we do more often than we like to admit. Doctors in the West diagnose children with attention deficit disorder, ADD, and prescribe them medications.  Sometimes I think someone should diagnose donors with DDD–donor deficit disorder–because donor priorities frequently change. Sometimes this is because of a change in government in the donor’s home capital, or because a new boss came to the donor organization, or because one division ended, or because a donor decides that a particular country has “graduated” (which is usually code for the fact that they don’t see it as useful to work there anymore). Because of all of this, it’s safer for you to have another donor in your back pocket.

 

Donors always have priorities–and you should feel free to ask them if there is, in writing, a document that spells these out. Then try to see if there is a way in which your proposal to a donor can seem responsive to what they say is most important to them. Donor priorities come with words they like. These move and change, and like fashion trends, often become popular among multiple donors at the same time. One year all the donors may be talking may be “sustainability,” or “advocacy” or “monitoring.”

 

Knowing what a particular donor is interested in supporting, and figuring out whether the project you have meets their priorities, is one half an objective assessment of your work, and half a storytelling exercise. What do your staff and supporters understand to be the story of your organization? Where you are starting? Where you are going?  Who are the heroes of your story?  What challenges do they find on their way?  When your story matches the story the donors are telling about their own work, that is a happy combination.

 

At my organization, the Open Society Institute (OSI) Public Health Program, one word we like right now is “advocacy”. This doesn’t always translate very well into the languages of countries where my program works, but if I had to define it, I would say it means action to change the laws, policies, and practices of those who hold power over other people. (I know one trainer who shows a picture of a hand on a light switch, and tells people that advocacy means thinking about whose hand is on the switch and how to move it to the “on”  or “off” position. Who can make it happen? What information do they need to be convinced? Who needs to carry that information to them? What it will take for there to be change, and light?)

 

OSI is less concerned than a lot of donors with evaluation, in part because we are a private foundation (meaning that we get our money mostly from private donors, not from a government). In general, grants from governments mean more evaluation, more paperwork, and less possibility of small grants. But even we at OSI, who like to be flexible, have to evaluate the impact of advocacy efforts. When you are funding service programs, it’s easy to define outcomes–so and so many people reached with a clean needle, so and so many clients seen by lawyers, and so on.

 

With advocacy, especially since policy change can take a long time, it’s harder to know at the end of a year whether the money we gave made any difference.  For you as NGOs, this means also thinking about how you would show, at the end of a year, whether the money you got made any difference.  Of course, funding always makes some difference.  If you had twelve meetings you didn’t have before, that is something, but it’s better to be able to tell the donor about a concrete change, or step toward change, that came out of those meetings.

 

As a donor working with groups that often get grants of $20,000 or less, one big piece of advice I would give is to keep it small. Sometimes, reading proposals, I feel like NGOs are good at capturing their ideal aspirations, like “changing the punitive paradigm that keeps drug users treated as criminals rather than patients”. But what I would really rather read as a donor is what small and concrete change will happen.

 

It’s unlikely that my grant for $10,000 dollars can undo the discriminatory social paradigm into which governments have poured millions of dollars and thousands of hours of propaganda. It’s more realistic that an NGO working locally can get the local social benefits office or provider of HIV treatment to stop writing the names of drug users or people with HIV on the board where anyone can read them, or that an NGO can help convince the local health department to issue a regulation allowing methadone to be provided in maternity hospitals. Those are small but concrete advocacy successes that will make a donor proud of the grant we gave you. An even greater challenge is to write how you were able to make positive change for others beyond the members of your group – change that can be reproduced at the level of the province, or the national government.

 

Finally, it’s a good idea to decide what you want to do and try to raise money for that, rather than trying to squeeze your organization into a shape that will get you the funds. Some pragmatism may be necessary–it’s true, for example, that there is a lot more money in the world for HIV programming than for human rights or drug policy. But if you go for a project that your organization doesn’t really care about, you may get the grant but lose your soul.

 

In the long run, and with good advice, it should be possible to get some funding for projects that match what you do best.

 

Daniel Wolfe is director of the International Harm Reduction Development Program at the Open Society Institute. IHRD works in 23 countries to protect the health and human rights of people who use drugs.