Organisation / Money Without A Sales Function

The Grant That Takes You Somewhere You Never Meant To Go

The most dangerous funding offer is the one that is genuinely attractive.

Chasing money away from your purpose almost never begins with a bad offer. It begins with a good one that is slightly off centre. The funding is real, the amount would transform the year, and the required activity is adjacent enough that a persuasive case can be made. Somebody drafts the application on the reasoning that the group can shape the work once the money arrives. It is always sincere and it is very often wrong, because the work that gets funded is the work that gets delivered, reported on and expected to continue.

The costs surface later and rarely appear in the budget. Coordinating the new activity absorbs the attention of the same small number of people who were already stretched. Reporting obligations attach to the new work and not to the core work, so the core work becomes the part that nobody has time to describe or defend. Volunteers recruited for the original purpose find themselves supporting something they did not sign up for. And when the funding period ends, the organisation faces a choice between disappointing the people it drew into the new activity and continuing something it cannot afford.

The discipline that helps is deciding in advance, in a calm moment, what the group will and will not chase, and requiring any application outside that boundary to be approved as a change of direction rather than as a funding decision. Two questions do most of the work. Would the group do this activity if the money were unrestricted? And what does delivering it cost in the time of the people who are already at capacity, not merely in the expenditure lines? A group that can answer both and still wants to proceed is making a strategic choice. A group that has not asked them is being steered.