The Pitch, Part Three: The Ask

My last two blog posts have focused on developing a pitch for my work. As I have sat with what I’ve worked on so far, it strikes me that no pitch is complete without an actual ask. There is an implied ask in both, but I never make it explicit. So I won’t keep having blog posts on my pitch, but I felt that a third part was necessary here to finish what I have been working on. I described my work, then modeled its return on investment, and now will finish up by directly stating what is needed to accomplish this work. 

To build a business infrastructure with the capacity to carry out our work across administration, empowerment, and transformation at the scale our mission requires, we must grow. The growth that we are looking for is not small. This year’s budget is around $200,000. We believe that at a minimum we must raise around $2.5 million to more fully realize the impact of our work. This is a crucial budget number for us where our staff structure is built out, but this is also the budget level where we are able to start to give funds to coalitions that are central to our work. 

As our budget continues to grow from there, a greater percentage of funding goes to coalitions in our network conducting work at a local level, enabling us to improve our model and the broader evidence base. An organization’s budget is a statement of its values. Built into our ideal budget is not just growth and stability for ourselves, but for those our work supports. This is not virtue signaling, but a sincere belief that to do the work we want we must build capacity in those serving at a local level. The education, technical assistance, and other supports we provide are valuable, but so is providing dedicated funding for coalitions to do prevention-oriented work. 

I can tell you from experience that this is not easy funding to come by. Some communities may have a foundation that supports prevention work, and there are some large national funders that a privileged few get to partner with, but there is not nearly enough. The work we are trying to do - building capacity together to promote wellbeing at a local level, creating an infrastructure that connects local work to society more broadly, bringing people together to work across ideological divides, synthesizing findings to ease the burden for future groups, and generating new ideas to continue innovating as need continues to evolve  - is not easy, and it is made more challenging by the fact that very little funding tackles such comprehensive solutions. Public systems, the way that too many government and philanthropic organizations fund work, too often fragment problems rather than working to address them holistically. There is good work done within specific issue areas and sectors that should continue, of course, but we must also have efforts that integrate all of these other efforts as part of a broader solution. This is simply missing.

The Change Campaign was developed to help address this problem, but we cannot become the intermediary organization that we aim to be without much more substantial funding. To be clear, our target goal is not just $2.5 million, but that is where we are able to more robustly fill the roles we see as necessary and believe we are positioned to fill. We have developed a budget that illustrates what scale would look like for The Change Campaign that goes into detail about not just what we are building toward, but also maps how we would grow into a larger organization. 

I will not go into that detail in this blog post, but if anyone is interested in what that looks like I would be happy to go through it. For this blog, however, I will spell out a couple different scenarios to show how we would leverage increased capacity at three different levels. 

If we were to receive $1 million today, which would be the result of incredible generosity and would mean substantial growth to our current budget, we would hire staff that begin facilitating all the dedicated functions of our organization. We would scale to this capacity over the course of about six months to develop and execute a hiring process with urgency but not rushing to ensure we find the right fit. While we would be able to increase our impact from where it is today we would not be able to fulfill the full function our organization aims for.

If we were to receive $10 million today, we would reach our minimum viable capacity to carry out the functions of the full organization. I mentioned that our budget for scale goes up to $10 million, yet we would not be able to reach that budget if we only received $10 million because it would be unwise to leverage all of a one-time gift at once with no further commitments in place. At that level we would go through the same six month hiring process described in the $1 million summary, and then would complete the remaining hiring over another three to six month period. Following the first round of onboarding and during the second hiring period, we would be able to develop and operationalize the infrastructure to begin to give out funding as well. Let’s assume that brings our funding in the first year to $1.5 million. The funding that we aren’t using at any given time would be put into a safe investment vehicle to compound remaining funding to go as far as possible in the future without threatening the principal. This infrastructure sets us up perfectly to run at the $2.5 million budget at the beginning of year two, and we would ensure that the organization is running smoothly at that level, and then begin building toward a $5 million capacity. Assuming that takes that year’s budget to $3.5 million as we grow throughout the year, we would be left with year three being a build out to the $5 million level with some additional funding available after that from the compound interest of safe investments. Compared to a $2.5 million budget, our staff would grow, but a more significant change would triple the funding we give to the coalitions we support, from $300,000 in the $2.5 million budget to $900,000 in the $5 million budget. This time line would give us the ability to raise funding to continue operating at least at this budget level, if not continuing to grow.

If we were to receive $100 million today, we would still take a similar early approach in building our staff over the first six months or so, but the next phase of hiring staff would be expedited to scale the organization more rapidly as we would be building toward the $10 million budget. The greatest change between the $5 million and $10 million budget is again the funding we would be able to give to the coalitions we support. Rather than another tripling as we double our budget again, however, it would be closer to a five-fold increase in grants to coalitions. As I said before, the priorities of an organization can be seen in their budget. There would be meaningful capacity building to The Change Campaign as an organization, but as we continue to grow from there, it increases the capacity provided to our network as it also grows. This is how we build an intermediary organization that enables our programming to not just sound good, but make a real impact in people’s and communities’ lives. The organizational structure across administration, empowerment, and transformation allows us to create learning loops that ensure that we are improving our offerings and ensuring we become more efficient as time moves forward. With $100 million in the bank, we would scale beyond the $10 million annual budget over time, but the theory of change and organizational growth pattern would follow the same trend. 

These numbers are not to say what any single gift should be, but to illustrate how we plan to grow as our funding does. $100 million could be raised through vast small donor efforts or from a single major gift. We do not want to put a floor nor ceiling on what anyone gives. What this budget outlook enables us to do is scale well beyond a $10 million budget without changing our model, remaining responsible as an organization to our mission. I believe that any organization should work to achieve its mission. The Change Campaign’s is to create a sustainable planet and a better future for all. We cannot make the progress we need to achieve this mission at our current level of funding. We need to build capacity to address the needs our society faces. 

If you are able to give, whether it’s a little or a lot, please do. Donating directly is important. Sharing the work we are building with others is also important. If you are able to give, whether as a philanthropist, a foundation employee, or an advisor to someone with the capacity to give, please consider making a contribution to The Change Campaign. Our current size is not a good indicator of our ambition, and we have concrete plans to realize those ambitions as our capacity grows. If this is the first you are hearing of us, you can look at the last couple blogs to find more information about the work we are doing and its return on investment. There are other blogs that show thought leadership that would grow along with successful capacity building, and there will continue to be more every week. So what is the ask? If you can give, please do, and consider giving as much as you comfortably can. You would be doing an important service to address the needs our society faces. If everyone pitches in, we can make amazing things happen together.