People in this area have an excellent record of being involved with community activities and this often means volunteering to help with charities.
There are smaller charities, which, because of their size, may not have the resources available within larger or longer-established organisations – especially the charities which are locally based, rather than nationally-run.
Volunteers may benefit from learning how to develop a fund-raising strategy, how to approach trusts and foundations which could help in their work, or how to develop corporate relationships. With the growth of online participation, people helping smaller charities might want to look at crowd-funding and other new means of raising money.
Thus, to help these volunteers in their important work, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has announced a fund-raising training programme, created specifically for small charities. The programme is either free or low cost.
The Foundation for Social Improvement will be running this programme, in partnership with three other organisations: the Small Charities Coalition, Local Giving and the Charities Finance Group.
The first year’s training programme was announced on 14 July and there is a variety of ways in which volunteers can take part. There will be face to face training and workshops, plus telephone advice sessions. A skilled volunteering mentoring programme is available. “Webinars” will be held – that’s a seminar on the web – and these last either half an hour or an hour and a half. There will be a Small Charity Fundraising conference. Bursaries are also available to enable people to train for the Fundraising Award Qualification run by the Foundation for Social Improvement. This programme will run throughout the next year.
There are some small charities where people will not be able to get along to take part in this training, so providers are also going to develop and share fundraising training resources, with toolkits available to support them.
Information is available on http://www.thefis.org/services. I hope that people will consider applying for the programme as this will help volunteers, supporting them in their work with these small charities.
Dominic Grieve
This article first appeared in the Bucks Free Press on 27th July 2018.