Funding and proposals
Impact needs strong funding
Your partners in securing funding
Today’s funding landscape is fuelled by constant change, intense competition and an ever-increasing time and compliance demand on NGOs. It’s hard to keep up.
But great impact needs proper funding.
We partner with high-impact NGO providing hands-on, low-cost support to attract more suitable funding.
The funding partnership enhances our partner’s funding strategy through our expertise, boosts donors engagement through our network and grows the funding pipeline through proposal writing service. We also provide up-to-date, tailored donor intelligence to our partners.
Together, we build strong, well-managed non-profit organisations that do good, better!
MzN Funding Support
This is a short summary of our funding support. If you have further questions, please contact us.
Funding Strategy
A sustainable funding strategy keeps pace and supports your impact and growth ambitions. It should not dictate them.
We work with our partners’ staff, board members and network to develop and execute a funding strategy. We add value and contribute to the process through our rigorous analysis, using our experience from working with over 500 non-profits globally and often with active input from donors, philanthropic partners and impact investors from our network.
We also learn from peer organisations and over 500 current and past MzN Partners about what really works (and what does not) to help
- Create clear plan: We help translate impact and growth ambitions into a clear funding plan-: We review and add value to the strategy, advising our partners on the range of funding options available and setting goals that add clarity to our partners entire organisation.
- Co-develop an implementation plan: We work with our partners to put the new approaches into practice and constantly improve
- Optimise & Collaborate: Through our partnership model we continually optimise the plan, provide hands-on support, reaching into our network of foundations, philanthropists and impact investors and provide training (free of charge).
We partner with non-profit organisation since 2011 to strengthen their funding base. Together, we develop strategies that deliver the right funding mix and implement strategies that build healthy financial reserves. Our advisors help our clients approach institutional and new donors, build traditional donors, philanthropist and investors. To boost independence, we also help set up income earning streams and associated social businesses.
Our partners are based in over 90 countries, working on humanitarian, development, national and international themes as well as education and arts & culture.
Contact us to discuss how we can partner and support your non-profit organisation
Some of our funding strategy insights
Donor Mapping & Network
Regular donor and funder mapping is one of the most important tools in the funding process. Getting it right often determines the success or failure of a funding strategy. We partner with non-profit organisation to match and map out likely funding sources from institutional and bi-lateral donors, philanthropic funders and impact investors.
We benefit from over 25 thematic funding maps we created and keep updated since 2011. Either as part of a Funding partnership or stand-alone exercise, we work together with our partners to make existing and future programs fundable by donors. Once created, we brief and regularly update the maps to ensure alignment, allowing the document to keep pace with impact ambitions and needs.
Proposal development support
Good proposals are the key building block to winning funds. Our depth of knowledge and decades of experienc with donor’s formal policies and informal preferences allow us to help write winning proposals.
Our institutional funding experts assist our clients worldwide to form consortia, develop funding strategies, pre-position themselves, and write convincing proposals.
We have particular expertise with respect to:
- European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (EC/ECHO)
- Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO)
- USAID
- Gesellschaft für internationale Zusammenarbeit/ Bundesministerium für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung (GIZ/BMZ)
- The World Bank
- Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA)
- Foundations
Our expertise includes Payment by Results contracting, project risk identification, and the development of new project processes and procedures to ensure that your organisation is properly represented in the proposal.
Our proposal writing experts write, review and improve draft concept notes and proposals to maximise their chances of success. As donor experts, we add our expertise to a thematically wide variety of proposals. We work remotely or on site, as required.
Funding Sprint Workshop
Our Sprint Workshops are intense 1 or 2 day workshops which are facilitated as a “pressure cooker” event to solve a specific funding challenge in a short period of time. Meticulously prepared, a successful Sprint results in a consensus to a fully funded and time-tabled action plan to solve a specific funding related problem.
The specific key questions of every sprint is different. Key questions we did answer in Sprint Workshops since January 2022 included:
- An international advocacy NGO defined an action plan to become a successful implementer of commercial contracts over twelve months.
- A mid-sized NGO addressing homelessness expanded its bi-lateral donor base within six months.
- A UN agency created consensus on a far reaching restructuring plan to attract new donors.
- An education focussed NGO optimised its business development team process, increasing bid submission by over 45%.
- A small charity working in the area of women-rights developed an action plan to build a fundraising unit, which was completed within 18 weeks.
How does it work?
- We discuss and define the specific challenge your organisation s facing or an opportunity you would like to address.
- A couple of weeks before the Sprint, we will conduct a 2-hour online workshop to get an even clearer understanding of the challenge or opportunity using the MzN-Solution Map, a MzN model combining the Theory of Change approach with a Startup-Canvas. This initial discussion is also a good way to align the team and get everyone up to speed. By the end, we sum up the challenge or opportunity in a single sentence.
- Then the Sprint begins (face to face meeting)! On day 1 of the Sprint workshop, we develop our strategy with the end in mind, set milestones and explore the route to success.
- On day 2, we narrow our focus, use our imaginations to list everything we need for the journey, and share our findings with stakeholders, investors, partners and friends, observe their reactions and adjust our plan accordingly.
If necessary, the workshop can be extended by a few days. Contact us if you like to bring a Sprint meeting to your organisation. Note that Sprint meetings are free of charge to MzN Partners.
MzN International has been providing funding support for War Child Deutschland’s institutional fundraising since August 2020. We are a small start-up NGO and, with the help of MzN, we were able to secure a larger grant from the German government, improve our systems and develop a number of boilerplate texts for future applications.Thank you MzN for the professional and reliable support over the past months.
