How funders can support small charities with DSC
Here's how funders can help small charities.
DSC works with a wide range of funders, helping them to strengthen their grant holders with high quality support and training that they could otherwise never afford to access.
Working in a small charity is demanding in many ways, but especially from a skills and training perspective. Staff and volunteers rarely have the luxury of only one job to do, and will regularly be carrying out critical work like writing funding bids, managing personnel issues, managing the office and service providers, supporting volunteers or countless other activities – all alongside their “normal” job.
This is where a dose of expert guidance can have a huge impact on the ability of staff and volunteers to deliver the most important things for their organisation and its beneficiaries, but there’s often not the budget or head space to access it.
That’s where we come in. With funders covering the cost of support on behalf of their grant holders, we’ve helped to provide:
Paid for conference places
Grant holders have been given free access to some or all of our online conferences, in some cases specific ones that relate to the funding they receive and the goals of the funder (like our Going Green environmental conference).
Group access to Funds Online
Funds Online is our easy to use online database of over 8,000 sources of funding. It’s designed to be user-friendly for non-professional fundraisers, with all the tools they need to find, apply and track applications. Funders paying for subscriptions for multiple grant holders can get the cost down by as much as 85%!
Bespoke training
Funders who know what their grant holders need help with can book any of our courses to be run just for their grant holders. We can also structure training days to include shared learning from grant-funded work, and facilitate discussions between grant holders about the work they are carrying out.
Bursary programmes
For funders that want to support their grant holders while giving them the choice of what to access we run bursary programmes where a set amount is allocated to each grant holder for them to use as they wish. All of the communication, admin, booking and delivery is done by us, the funder just foots the bill!
Bespoke Funder Plus programmes
Along the same principle we can construct and deliver a full Funds Plus programme, and make it as simple or complex as needed. Want to tailor support to different grant holders, recipients of different awards, or grant holders at different points in their funding relationship? We can do that no problem. We can combine any number of our 200+ courses, conferences, training courses, online databases and other in-house services to build exactly what they need – and run the whole thing seamlessly with as little involvement as the funder wants to have.
So if you’re a funder looking for ways to support your small (or not so small) grant holders, get in touch with us as cs@dsc.org.uk and we’ll be happy to chat through what we’ve done to support other funders and how we can help.
If you’re not a funder but you like the idea of being able to access support from DSC for nothing, forward this to your existing funder and tell them how great it would be if they did something like this!
