Back in September, I had the privilege of coordinating two workshops titled “Securing Sustainable Support: A Presentation and Q&A on Sustainable Fundraising for Child Helplines” for our network of child helplines.
The training was led by expert speakers Jana Ledvinová, Director, consultant and lecturer, and Jan Kroupa, Founder, lecturer and consultant from the Czech Fundraising Centre.
Held online, this workshop brought together 59 professionals from various regions – all interested in maximising their fundraising efforts.
Background
Child helplines play a unique and essential role in providing care, protection, and emergency response services to children in crisis. Many of our members struggle with securing long-term funding. Additionally, conventional evaluation mechanisms do not always apply to the unique services offered by child helplines, further complicating funding efforts. Standard 4 of Child Helpline International’s Core Quality Standards Framework emphasizes the importance of funding stability as one of the crucial elements to ensure reliable service delivery. Child helplines worldwide have developed various models and strategies to finance their operations, combining traditional and innovative funding sources such as raising awareness, and engaging with wider stakeholder groups. This Q&A series aims to share knowledge and experiences in fundraising to ensure sustainable, high-quality services for all children, including marginalized groups.
This training was designed to equip child helpline staff with essential skills and knowledge, focusing on enhancing their ability to secure financial support for their initiatives, exchanging fundraising expertise among members, and exploring obstacles and opportunities to increase sustainable child helpline services.
This workshop serves as an exclusive resource brought to our member child helplines as part of Child Helpline International’s Learning Strategy. This Strategy serves to further enhance and support quality of services provided by child helplines, and also contribute to our network’s strength, coherence and positioning by improving the use of existing knowledge and enabling the co-creation of new knowledge. With this structured approach to learning, we aim to strengthen collaboration and create a more interconnected community of child helplines, ultimately leading to an elevated quality of services, which can enhance the impact and effectiveness of our network collectively.
Highlights
In Workshop 1, we discussed how to explore funding opportunities and strategy. We focused on how to identify potential funding sources, examine best practices in fundraising, and develop strategic approaches to secure financial support. Additionally, we looked at methods to implement techniques for achieving long-term financial stability, emphasizing the importance of building strong donor relationships, particularly for initiatives that benefit children.
Workshop 2 built upon the insights from the first session, where we looked at how to develop income-generating activities aimed at supporting staff development and operational needs. We also discussed how to write effective grant proposals, emphasizing efficient and effective approaches while leveraging the strategic insights gained from Workshop 1.
The workshops emphasized a Q&A approach, where participants were encouraged to share their challenges and good practices.
A key takeaway from the workshops was the reframing of fundraising as a means of fostering alignment between a non-profit’s mission and its resources. Rather than seeing it as a burden, organizations are encouraged to view fundraising as an opportunity to connect their programmes and solutions with the resources needed to create lasting impact. It’s about building relationships, engaging people in your cause, and inviting them to become part of meaningful social change—captured in the idea of “friendraising“, “funraising” and “freedom raising”, where donors give not just because they believe in the cause, but because it brings them joy and fulfilment.
A stand-out moment from the workshop was the discussion on using AI tools for grant writing – helping to streamline the process, also acknowledging that donors are using tools themselves, or using it to help brainstorm and refine ideas. As Jana noted: “Always inject your unique passion and story into the final draft—because, in the end, donors connect with the human touch behind the mission.”
These exercises were instrumental in fostering culture of exchange between members and helped us to consider some new techniques to put in practice.
Key Takeaways
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- Child Helplines provide quite a specific and specialized service to children and young adults in need. Yet they are a solid part of the broad, transnational “children rights movement”. Building relationships with donors is an essential engagement tool to grow and to strengthen this movement.
- Your donors are not interested in supporting your helpline, in fact, they could not care less about your helpline. They are interested in and they care for one thing only: they want to help the kids you serve. No more, no less.
Jan Kroupa
Czech Fundraising Centre
Concluding Thoughts
Coordinating this workshop was an immensely fulfilling experience. I am grateful to our expert speakers, Jan and Jana, and the dedicated participants for making this training a success.
For any child helpline staff considering this training, you can find the materials on our eLearning platform.
Laura Holliday
Learning Coordinator
