Building for success

“Habitus helped us by asking questions we’d never have thought of. They helped us focus on what was achievable and in our control, but most of all, how to create a body of evidence of our impact from our very first initiative.”

Inclusion is not an opportunity, it's a necessity! This is the tagline for the brand-new non-profit, The Colour Factor, which we began working with at the beginning of 2020. Three incredible women took the plunge to fill the gaps in services, and support racialised people in their community. Their vision is to create brave spaces of healing for racialised communities through conversation, collaboration, and creativity.

Knowing that great ideas only get you so far, they engaged with us to execute a three-stage plan of attack: support with grant/bid writing, create a 3-year strategy and business plan, develop an organisation-wide and service-specific evaluation framework to be able to show their wider impact.

Challenges

The Colour Factor emerged during a time of increased visibility for their cause, and with leaders who excel at creative community engagement strategies, they were in a prime position to launch their ideas and services into the community. With a strong sense of purpose, they knew the outcomes and impact they wanted to achieve but struggled to prioritise and set a clear direction. They identified that they wanted to ensure their services were having the impact they wanted to achieve but were lacking internally with the evaluation and measurement skills.

They also wanted to explore the various ways they could evaluate their work. With storytelling being an important part of healing in many of the cultures they work in, they wanted to ensure this approach was given high priority when developing measurement tools. Subsequently, they wanted to ensure that this methodology was robust enough to withstand scrutiny of their service outcomes and needed help in designing this.

How we made a difference

Recognising the need for funding was priority number one, we began working simultaneously on grant writing and building an organisation-wide evaluation framework that collected integrated outcomes from the outset. Also during this period, we ran a number of virtual strategy sessions (thanks Covid!) to build out their initial three-year strategic plan, supporting them to prioritise and set a clear focus and direction.

It was important at this stage to help them discover what data they wanted to collect for themselves, and what data they knew would be important to collect rather than just relying on collecting just what funders asked them for.

This helped with the next phase where we worked with them on incubating their ideas, creating new innovative approaches to healing and mental health supports for racialised communities, and designing these with impact and outcomes in mind.

Results

  • Success in 85% of funding applications.

  • Developed a focused 3-year strategic and business plan.

  • Diverse fund development strategy created.

  • An evaluation framework designed to collect meaningful outcomes data.

  • Have own outcomes data to utilise for community advocacy and case for support.

  • Building strong relationships and foundation of trust and seen as experts in their field with community foundation and government funding partners.

Our work with The Colour Factor led to a successful fundraising campaign, winning 85% of funding applications submitted. The strategy of focusing on collecting their own impact data and outcomes, has helped them to be able to capture evidence for future grantors and not just existing ones. Funders have been impressed that they have their own up-to-date data readily available to respond to questions, and this has laid the foundation for becoming a trusted non-profit partner and building strong relationships.

Being such a new organisation, it has been easy for them to get swept up in how much there is still to do, so we created an easy framework for them to keep track of how much they have, and continue to achieve.

 

Habitus has a track record of supporting non-profits, charities and social enterprises to scale, identifying their impact and source funds. For more information on how Habitus can help your organisation increase your impact and ability to achieve your mission, clicking on the button below.


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