The increasing demand in humanitarian aid and charity projects raises the question of funding and new concepts for financial resources. For example, IPMA supported it Member Association in Nepal immediately after the devastating earthquakes. The question is how to address the topic and how to find right resources / channels to raise funds, especially in a context of excessive liquidity of many financial institutions including foundations and donor organisations.

Furthermore, in a country like Switzerland, where IPMA is registered, more than 350 new foundations where created in 2014 so that their number totaled 13.064. This way, Switzerland is the country with the highest number of foundations in Europe. This could incentivize foundations to dedicate their money and time in developing professional project management in aid and charity organisations, baring also in mind that the trend of professionalization of foundations was confirmed by the Executive Director of the Swiss Foundations in the previous annual report.

In this context, the Swiss Fundraising Day organized by the Swiss fundraising association to which IPMA was invited took place on 25 June in the Swiss capital Bern.

The objective of IPMA’s participation was threefold:

1. Increase IPMA’S visibility among Swiss fundraisers and donor organisations
2. Evaluate which cluster among the 13.000 Swiss donor organisations could be interesting for IPMA as a funding organization. This means that the vision and mission of IPMA must supplement / complement the vision of some Swiss or Swiss based foundations that believe in a world in which all humanitarian aid and charity projects succeed.
3. Initiate the participation of IPMA as keynote at upcoming fundraising events (Swiss fundraising events and international ones). In this context, it can be mentioned that the International Fundraising Conference (IFC) will take place in 20-23 October 2015 in the Netherlands with 1.000 attendees expected (www.ifc.org)

The fundraising day addressed topics of interest to IPMA such as “Present trends in fundraising”, “how to approach foundations for benefit from donations? How to work on donor’s retention and how to measure it? How to achieve donor loyalty?” (see www.swissfundraising.org). In this context one could mention crowd funding (as one aspect of fundraising) that consists of combining a life changing event with a virtual fund raising platform which in turn is connected to social media. Example: I am a project manager. I want to run a project / initiative to combat child labor in a particular area (sector or country), where I can introduce best practices in project management. The project amounts to 20.000 thousands Euro. I am also an occasional marathon runner and preparing my next marathon. If you spend one euro for 1 km, I will be able to run that project thanks to your donations. At the same time, you will follow the funding result online and get a closeout report after the project implementation.

In line with IPMA´s strategic goal “creating value adding benefits for the profession, economy, society and environment through audience oriented, integrated and self-sustaining know-how, products and services”, IPMA was able during the event – which attracted 200 participants from many sectors and organisations – to achieve the following results: 1. Get confirmation, that volunteer work in aid organisations is more and more based on project oriented commitment and less and less long lasting commitment by the volunteers (confirmed by the Swiss Red Cross President). 2. Start to build a network with Swiss fundraisers and foundations and donor agencies (the participant and company list with all contact details is availableon IPMA’s working platform). 3. Understand the extent to which fundraisers could support IPMA activities / projects as well as those of IPMA Member Association to balance present financial resources available for humanitarian aid and charity projects 4. Get some expertise on the major fundraising trends and communication approaches / channels with donor organisations, some of which could be applied in other countries.

The next step will be to find the adequate resources to work in this area, i.e. professional volunteers of IPMA network or externally to increase our impact and achieve tangible benefits. Your help is needed: please contact me if you are interested! Finally, the fact that a fundraising award ceremony took place for the second time during the Swiss fundraising day shows that this sector is becoming increasingly dynamic. An area where project managers could extend they synergetic network that combines voluntary and professional work to co-create value for the expansion of the profession.