Business Growth & Fundraising Strategy

(April 2021 – March 2024)

Contents

1. Purpose of the Plan - page 1

2. Current Income - page 1

3. A Flexible Organisation - page 2

4. Future Priorities - page 3

5. Core Funding - page 3

6. Evaluation and Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) - page 5

7. Income - page 6

8. Trusts and Foundations - page 7

9. Self-Generated - page 8

10. Action Plan - page 12

1.Purpose of the Plan

Cwm Taf Morgannwg Mind (CTMM) has grown to become a significant deliverer of mental health services within Merthyr Tydfil, Rhondda Cynon Taf and Bridgend areas, with an income of £1.4 million. The majority of this income (70%) is from statutory public sector contracts and with little income for ‘core’ funding. Other income derived from charitable trusts (20%), and trading (training and counselling), together with some income through public donation (10%).

The purpose of this plan is to set out pathway to help the organisation diversify its funding base and build a more secure core that allows the organisation to be flexible to future project delivery opportunities and funding availability.

The charity expects to sustain and achieve income through four key funding activities, including:

1. Public Sector Commissioning

2. Grant, Trusts and Foundations

3. Commercial Enterprise

4. Fundraising

2.Current Income

Table 1 below lists the current income secured together with information on the amounts and due end date. Income from donations grew significantly in 2020, to almost £75k from under £15k in previous years, this demonstrates the huge potential for donations as an income stream and one, that with investment should yield healthy returns.

Current services are show below:

It is clear that some services are secured until 2021 with contracts from Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board (CTMUHB) with some longer-term grant funds.

CTM Mind is successful at winning tenders to deliver services and has a track record of delivering them successfully and has built a strong portfolio of projects in this way. Projects are now themed into three key areas:

1.Mental Health Prevention Services

2.Housing, Homelessness and Recovery Services

3.Commercial and Fundraising Services

Key strengths for winning tenders include:

1. Pro-active engagement, strategic awareness, and local intelligence

2. Dedicated resources to write tender applications – accepting support from Mind Nationals Bid Development Team where appropriate.

3. Mind service design methodology

4. Theory of change methodology –measuring our impact

5. Robust organisational strategy, fundraising plan, policies and procedures

However, CTM Mind is more than a collection of projects, and to ensure it remains a fundable service and provides value for money it must be greater than the sum of its parts. Therefore, the core function needs to add more value than simply management of the tenders and projects. This has multiple benefits:

1. A core that provides a service/ added value can attract funding

2. Securing funds for core work will reduce the costs of future tenders thus making them more competitive

3. Showing how the core adds value to projects will help ensure management costs are covered by funders

4. Demonstrating how projects link via the core will help demonstrate the need for each project if it/they can be shown to help complete a larger package of support. So, showing a pathway through the organisation, where the core is the link between each service for example

• Was is cost effective to deliver? (was it profitable/ did it use additional resources / Did it cover all internal costs)

• How did it impact upon other services / did it add value to other areas of work?

• Does the project address current organisational priorities? (Table 2)

3.A Flexible Organisation

Having secured a large income there is a danger that the organisation seeks to maintain this and continually seeking to fund large initiatives. This will become time consuming (especially where new funders need to be found for each service) and risks delivering services which are perhaps not actually the best for service users and meeting local need.

To help manage this the following is suggested:

That there are clear criteria for why a project/ initiative is to be started or continues (1) Evaluations of project also focus on the future need of the work and how it should evolve The organisation is not afraid to shrink in size or finish a project

Exit strategies for projects that are built into initiatives are genuine and not written purely to satisfy a funder’s requirement

(1)– criteria for project continuation.

How successful was the delivery?

Is the need still there?

4.Future Priorities

All activities delivered by CTM Mind must fit within the table below:

What activity / why is this needed

Staying well: Support people likely to develop mental health problems, to stay well.

Primary Care and Prevention services –significant demand on NHS as well as offering alternatives to clinical interventions.

Empowering choice: Empower people who experience a mental health problem to make informed choices about how they live and recover

Improving services and support: Ensure people get the right services and support at the right time to help their recovery and enable them to live with their mental health problem

Enabling social participation: Open the doors to people with experience of mental health problems participating fully in society

Removing inequality of opportunity: Gain equality of treatment for people who experience both mental health and other forms of discrimination

Organisational excellence: Make the most of our assets by building a culture of excellence.

5. Core Funding

The ‘Core’ has two elements. The essential services: those that are seen to be the services that lie at the heart of the organisation and that would be unlikely to exist if you were not there. The core functions; the activities that service the organisation.

Recovery and Resilience services – enabling people to make choices and engage in recovery-based projects.

Robust project output and outcome monitoring and evaluation measures which enable us to measure impact.

A range of engagement initiatives which enable people to participate in our project activities and more.

To support the Mind policy and campaigns work by providing evidence of project impact and local needs.

To sustain the Mind Quality Mark (MQM) and other quality measures whilst contributing positively to Mind and the Mind Network.

a. What are the essential core services?

Governance, Management, Mind Affiliation, Human Resources, Financial Management, Marketing and Communications, Quality Assurance (MQM), Monitoring and Evaluation, Information Technology (IT), Administration, Accommodation and Utilities.

b. Funding the core

1. Generated new income – counselling and training; potential to develop and expand these. This will have minimal impact on staff as the work is outsourced to a third party. They could also be tasked with promoting in new areas on an enhanced commission rate.

2. There are functions of the core that can be made into fundable projects; and/or included as elements of bids. Therefore, they are not added to the management element of the budget, but an additional element. Evaluation and monitoring being the main one.

3. Evaluation and importantly learning and acting upon the learning can become the focus of funding bids; thus, supplementing the core, but without being an application for core funding.

a. Developing an evaluation along the Asset Based Community Development model and integrating Social Return on Investment would have real benefits. It would provide a positive way of evaluating a service and learning to build new ones.

b. A selling point could be to evaluate the organisations as a whole rather than the individual elements. A case could be put together to demonstrate why that would be of great value.

c. Learning and showing how people use the organisation, tracking their moveme through the support would be beneficial as this would demonstrate how people are helped at different stages

4. Funders such as Henry Smith Charity, Tudor Trust and Garfield Weston will fund core functions. These bids will be helped by being able to demonstrate how the core adds value to the projects that are run.

c. Full Cost Recovery (FCR)

The Full Cost Recovery model of the organisation need to be robust to demonstrate to funders that the core contribution being asked for is needed.

Staff time on each project compared to all staff time in the organisation is a common and widely accepted methodology, for example, this can include core staff time as a percentage split in order to cover all associated costs.

A problem with FCR models can be that projects become very costly when the on costs are added in. This is especially the case where there are few projects and as such, they bare a high proportion of the organisations costs. Being able to reduce the core costs is always going to be beneficial; this can include:

• Securing funding for core elements such as training, evaluation, marketing

• Putting core functions as separate cost elements in applications (especially with Lottery) to take them out of the generic ‘core’ cost.

Even where funders will not pay full cost recovery; it is worth including the cost to the organisation as a match funding contribution you are making.