Developing a sustainable funding strategy involves looking realistically at your organisation’s needs over the next few years, thinking about the opportunities available to generate the income you need and aiming to get a good funding mix which will help you to balance the ebbs and flows in different types of income.

It takes strong planning skills, auditing of costs, diversifying income and building organisational skills and capacity to ensure the best and most effective use of resources.

Practical steps towards sustainability:

• work out your current income and expenditure. Mark each source with a low, medium or high level of dependency in terms of how much of your organisations total income it generates. This should help identify the areas to prioritise for development.
• plan effectively. Knowing where you want to be in say three, five or ten years will help you understand the type and amount of funding needed and to plan for the end of individual funding streams.
• diversify income. Developing a range of sources of income makes third sector organisations more stable and less reliant on any single funder. Having just one or two sources of income will mean problems when, for example, a grant runs out or a funder changes their criteria.