Contents
12. Fundraising Advice
Accessing funding can pay for a dedicated coordinator for your area and allow you to purchase the necessary equipment
Top Tip!
NCVO (National Council of Voluntary Organisations) have put together a really useful guide, detailing some general tips for fundraising as a voluntary organisation. We recommend that you read through this as a first course of action.
Thematic areas
- Reducing food waste
- Promoting environmental sustainability
- Supporting vulnerable communities
- Enhancing community cohesion and wellbeing
- Volunteering opportunities
Measuring impact
Funders will usually be interested in a thematic area and your application will need to outline what you’re already doing within this area, what you would like to improve using the grant funding, and how you will achieve it.
When hosting your gleans, it’s useful to gather ongoing stories and statistics that showcase how gleaning is beneficial to: the farmer, the volunteers, reducing food waste, the recipient organisations.
Top Tip!
The more info you store, the more funding doors open
For example, if there is a funding pot aimed at community action activities for 65+ and you’ve got records of who all your volunteers are, as well as case studies and feedback forms from relevant volunteers in the age group, you will have a baseline measurement of how many 65+ volunteers in your list and a compelling story for your application
Social impact
- Take pictures and videos of the day
- Write up/film case studies with volunteers and farmers
- Create a feedback form for volunteers to complete at the end of the glean where you can extract key information for funding applications.
- Questions in these forms can be tailored to thematic areas above. Asking questions in the feedback with multiple choice or rating scale questions are best
- eg. ‘XX% of our volunteers say gleaning has helped with their self confidence / understanding of the issues of farm level food waste / feeling part of the community‘ etc.
- Questions in these forms can be tailored to thematic areas above. Asking questions in the feedback with multiple choice or rating scale questions are best
- Ask recipient organisations to provide quotes and take pictures of the meals they have made with the donated food
Numbers and stats
A record of the amount gleaned and number of volunteers for each glean is the key data you should keep. Other useful stats to keep may include number of new farms, new volunteers, total media engagement, total carbon saved, total meals made from surplus.
In funding applications, you can use these numbers as a baseline to help with shaping your outcomes that you’d hope to achieve with the funding.
Where do I find funders?
Small regional pots of grant funding suit gleaning activities, as opposed to larger national pots with intensive reporting needs. Generally, paying for a salary for a two or three day a week role, and or funding for equipment or other capital costs have been successful.
Check your local online voluntary service, or ask AI exactly what you’re looking for. For example ‘Find me grant opportunities in Sussex for between £5k and £20k that fund staff costs and capital costs for a CIC and focus on thematic areas including: community action, sustainable food, food waste, climate and nature, volunteering. Format as a table with the following headings: Funder/Donor name, funding range, thematic areas, application deadline’.
AI is great for finding funders but not for writing the application, as funders can usually tell.
Feel free to download and use the Gleaning Network logo in your email signature when sending applications and mention you are part of this network.
Corporate gleaning days
Another way to raise funds is to through creating a package for corporate groups to attend gleaning days. There are many ways to organise and price this but we recommend creating a package based on group size rather then per person.
