Are your local and regional municipal governments supporting your charity? If not, they might just be your top prospects. Based on Inspire’s experience planning and executing municipal solicitation, we have distilled municipal funding strategy down to ten best practices.

Treat municipalities like leadership donors

This means do your research, prepare a compelling request for support, build relationships, ask for the right amount and get the right team in place to do the ask.

Cultivate mayor, councillors, senior staff

Get to know each councillor and the mayor individually. Be familiar with their politics, their “hot” issues, their feelings about municipalities funding charities (i.e. do they think of this as provincial downloading) and the services they may have received from your organization. Figure out how to turn your naysayers into champions. Ask yourself who has the best relationship with each elected official to facilitate one-on-one meetings, and mobilize a team from their ward to call or write to them.

While the vote to support your request will be made by council, you must build a solid relationship with senior staff and be respectful of staff leaders who make the financial recommendations. Finally, invite your councillors, the mayor and the top administrator to your offices to showcase firsthand your facilities, programs and expertise.

Evaluate community benefit

If the project is large, commission an economic impact study. Municipalities make their decisions based on a number of factors – residents’ use of the charitable services, the importance of having an array of services close to home to attract and retain residents, and the impact on recruiting new businesses. An economic impact study will tell you how much buying power and economic spin you create in the area.

Engage the public

Some charities (and municipalities too) undertake public opinion polling to build awareness and gather positive statistics to influence council. Ask your volunteers, staff, donors and friends to write letters of support to council. Your community’s support will influence elected officials.

Engage your “family”

Employees, volunteers, clients and board members are powerful lobbyists and ambassadors on your behalf. If they’re not supportive, you may be in trouble. They may be spouses, friends or relatives of your councillors and one negative conversation can have a huge impact. So find the right way to reach and involve your “family” – by email, through signage or through face-to-face meetings. Make buttons or stickers so your insiders can declare their support publicly.

Prepare thorough package

Must-haves for your package include a succinct version of your case for support, demographics, usage statistics, client stories and testimonials, a rationale for the requested amount, a breakdown of the ask by ratepayer information, data showing how other municipalities have supported nonprofit organizations, economic impact data, letters of support and plans for recognizing the municipality’s contribution.

Ask for right amount

Support your request with a business rationale: perhaps the percentage of residents accessing services, a flat rate per taxpayer or a percentage of the project cost. Most municipal grants offer a payment schedule of five years, but substantial payouts take longer.

You must also understand how the municipality will fund the request – general revenues, a special levy, gaming revenues or simply borrowing the money. So in essence, you must understand the financial health of your municipality. Break your ask down into a manageable and appealing amount. 

$30 per ratepayer per year hardly seems as much as $2.5 million.

Offer donor recognition

Most charities host a press conference to announce the gift, honour municipal donors on their donor walls, present commemorative plaques and invite council to donor recognition events. In other words, thank and recognize municipalities like all other leadership donors.

Presenting your request

Your municipal insiders will help you determine how to move your request through the governance system. Typically, you will make a formal presentation (a cultivation meeting to update council on your project plans) prior to the ask. Then you will present your request to a committee. If that is endorsed, you will then make a presentation at a council meeting.

Be sure to have your CEO, the board chair and your foundation board chair (if you have one) attend each meeting. As the meetings move along, having more of your “family” present will send a strong signal of internal support. And of course, the night of the formal ask to council, you must pack council chambers with your supporters.

Be mindful of timing

Be aware of the budget process schedule and the timing within the election cycle. Typically in the last six months of their mandate, council does not make any major financial decisions that would bind a future council.

Lastly, it is wise not to ask unless you have a good feel that you will get a majority “yes” vote. Once you are in council chambers, your request is public so you must be prepared to deal with the public relations issues that follow – letters to the paper in your favour or not, and reporting both positive and negative.

Inspire research shows that municipal requests can take over a year and up to two years. This is no different than other research that has shown the typical million-dollar-plus gift takes on average 14 months from cultivation to decision. So be patient, understand your municipal process, understand the people and be prepared. It is definitely worth the time!

Sue Egles is a partner with Inspire and has a diverse fundraising background both in and outside of the company. Since joining Inspire in 1997, her broad fundraising experience has resulted in extremely creative and successful programs for funding from municipalities across Canada.

Inspire is a Canadian philanthropic consulting firm that has, in its 20 year history, helped over 1,000 organizations raise more money.