Dar es Salaam, TZ – Local Organizations Building Fundraising Capacity – 5 May 2015

On February 11-12 March Molly’s Network conducted a Molly’s Members’ Meeting for 14 organisations. 27 participants attended in total (there were two participants from most of the member organisations).  Organisations travelled from all over Tanzania for the two-day workshop, which focused on proposal writing and donor communication.  This theme was chosen as an area of common weakness in the assessed organisations and an area that the majority of other members struggle with.

The workshop was highly participatory with a ‘learning through doing’ approach to complement the theoretical lessons.  Molly’s Network’s Executive Director facilitated most of the first day, as her background and training is in fundraising.  The organisations learned how to develop a proposal and what is needed, and then put this into practise in teams as they wrote proposals to try and save Valentine from Claudius the Cruel (given the date, the workshop had a Valentine’s Day theme!).  This work was further supported by Mike Connors, Community Fund Coordinator at the US Embassy, who facilitated a session on the ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ of proposal writing from a donor’s perspective.  This was an extremely valuable session for the members as they had the opportunity to ask the sort of questions that are not normally possible to ask, and many reported it as one of the highlights.

The second day was largely consolidating the learning on the first day.  The members were put into teams again to develop a proposal, this time based on the Tanzanian popular TV programme ‘Bongo Star Search’.  The teams discussed and debated problem statements, how to link their outcomes to their outputs and activities, and what information to put in the budget.

In the early afternoon Christine Skladany, an independent monitoring and evaluation consultant, made a visit to support the workshop.  She facilitated a session on Results-Based Management that provided further clarity on the importance of a well-structured logframe and clarity around terminology.  The day concluded with Lynette Corcino (Canada Fund Coordinator) and Eric Bertram (stand-in Canadian Ambassador) judging the Bongo Star Search teams.  These external judges provided extra motivation for the teams to work hard and gave some very valuable feedback to all in terms of their presentation style and content.

The workshops should help all of the organizations become more sustainable by improving their ability to communicate their needs and impacts to funding sources.