Hi! Welcome to Funding Solutions. We are a team of professional Fundraising Consultants in South Africa. We serve the NPO. More specifically, we are Catherine and Jo-Anne Smetherham, Asna Bhana, and Helen Vosloo.
If the Coronavirus is understandably causing you to panic about the sustainability of your NPO, please feel free to phone us for a free discussion. Yes, the sector is going to be hit hard, and yes, we need to brace ourselves. Fundraising and holding on to donors is now more important than ever. Working with the fundraising sector in times of crisis is and always has been, our core business.
Our mission is simple: we work to help NPOs to get the money they need, to change the world in their own unique and significant way.
Our experience
Asna – Specialist Fundraiser
Asna is social worker by profession and has a postgraduate degree in Social Science. She has worked in the development sector for 25 years. The past 15 years has been in specialising in building strong and sustainable organisations through effective fundraising. With a deep understanding of the NPO sector and its unique assets and challenges, Asna works in an incisive way, starting from a continuum of what we have and what we know – all the way to growing donor confidence and engaging new donor interest. It is within these core values that Asna works at fundraising strategy development, action planning, implementation and measurement. This together with a cohesive team has delivered vibrant and meaningful funding partnerships. The type where an enduring donor community is created.
Helen – Specialist Fundraiser
Helen entered fundraising through her career as one of the country’s foremost performing musicians and as founder of Keiskamma Music Academy, a rural music education and performance programme in the Eastern Cape. In the close to 15 years since then, she has gained extensive experience as fundraiser. The GIBS Social Entrepreneurship Certificate Programme, which she completed in 2015, offered a significant opportunity to deepen her knowledge base. Her fundraising experience extends to building relationships with corporate, government and philanthropic bodies, both inside South Africa and abroad. Fundraising gives her an opportunity to link people’s innate desire to do good with a cause close to their hearts.
Jo-Anne – PR specialist and Fundraising Consultant in Cape Town
Jo-Anne is an award-winning journalist with over 18 years’ experience in writing for the media. She is also a public relations practitioner for clients including many NPOs. Her experience has given her exceptional communication skills. She understands how to win hearts and minds through building relationships and telling stories. She joins the Fundraising Consultants in South Africa team with these skills.
Danny – Specialist Fundraiser and Proposal Writer
Danny is a qualified and experienced lawyer. She entered the NPO field by working for Legal Aid and has since honed her skills in fundraising. Danny specialises in proposal writing. In particular she focuses on major grant donors such as the National Lottery Board. You can also use Danny for her extensive experience in donor research.
Catherine – Founder of Funding Solutions
Catherine is the founder of Funding Solutions and while she no longer works directly with clients, she remains the owner of Funding Solutions. She has worked in the non-profit and fundraising sector in South Africa for over 20 years. In this time she has worked as a Project Leader and a Fundraiser. She has co-founded an NPO. The bulk of her experience lies in developing relationships with donors. She writes proposals and reports. In addition to this she builds donor bases and develops sustainable fundraising strategies for NPOs. On the other side of the funding desk she has worked as a Grants Officer. In this seat whe worked for an organisation managing the CSI funds of some of South Africa’s biggest multinational companies. This work gave her a bird’s eye view of the development sector in South Africa. It also gave her an understanding of the inner workings of a CSI department. She now works in the UK for an NPO that works in the disability sector.
Catherine, Jo-Anne, Asna, Danny and Helen work together as Fundraising Consultants in South Africa.
“Most giving is 80% emotion and 20 % rational. And the best way to get to someone’s emotions is to tell a story.”