You Need to Do THIS to Get Into Their Pockets!

Who gets the funding isn't a random decision, and your product or service offering isn't the only thing they're looking at to make it!

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Photo credit: Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Let’s be honest, sometimes looking for funding can feel like a real crapshoot:

• You’ll work for ages refining your product or service,

• You have a genuine need for funding,

• You find a funding call assuring that funders or investors are absolutely looking to support businesses or non-profits that look like yours,

• You do the application process PERFECTLY,

• You still get told no, or get passed over for some other enterprise (maybe even worse: that’s doing something similar to yours!)

Sounding familiar?

You may have even been told that your business or non-profit idea has potential or is really good, but nevertheless here you sit with a funding or investment rejection letter. So it’s not just your offering they’re looking at; clearly there’s another factor at work here.

This factor in question is the Value needs.

What are Value needs?

To understand what Value needs even are, we’ve got to walk it back to the very definition of what Value is:

Value means providing your offering to a client or stakeholder in a way that is meaningful to them.

Another way to state this is to say:

Value means providing your offering, to a client or stakeholder in a way that meets their Value needs.

Thus, the Value needs are the full extent of what your client or stakeholders are looking for in an offering, that includes and goes beyond the offering itself. It’s essentially the Value they are looking to get out of a given offering.

“There’s so many ‘Value(s)’ to keep track of!”

It might look that way, but you’ll be happy to know that it really isn’t complex at all! In practice, here’s what everything is looking like:

• There’s the Value YOU have to offer

  • your Value Proposition is how you communicate that Value to your target clients, partners or investors

• There’s the Value your targets are looking for,

  • which technically speaking exists irrespective of what your Value is; they want what they want and what they want is what they’re looking for

So the Value needs?

Are essentially a description of what exactly they want in terms of Value from an offering, like yours!

In fact, you can think of the Value needs like the contra-Value Proposition: it’s the proposition of the Value that the person you’re talking to wants!

How exactly does this connect to funding application success?

Believe it or not, funding programmes and schemes are not just looking to give anybody their money (shocker, right?). In fact in recent years, these programmes have become stricter and much more strategic in the ways they go about selecting for their beneficiaries.

In the past, it used to be enough for your business or non-profit idea to just sound good or look good on paper. Now, your offering has to not only create Value, but it also has to create the kind of Value they’re specifically looking for.

And you’ll likely have seen it already in the applications they ask you to complete; they want:

• Impact statements,

• Full financial statements,

• Profit projections,

• Projected social impact, etc.

It’s not for nothing: all these bits of information are the ways these programmes now quantify the Value they want to gain from the businesses and non-profits they fund! They give you an inside peek at what’s actually meaningful to them (connecting us back to the very definition of Value!)

So here’s the secret about using Value needs when approaching prospective funders:

What secures YOUR success when approaching them is having a firm understanding of their Value needs;
then using that understanding to position YOUR offering as the offering that will best meet those needs, out of every other offering they’re considering!

By understanding the fullness of what they’d be looking for (their Value needs), you can leverage that understanding, your Value Proposition and your offering to nail those landing applications and interviews.

And in the next few Blueprints, I’ll walk you through how you can uncover those Value needs AND how you can use them to successfully land funding, every time!

Like my work? You can get more of it!

• Listen to my podcast, Inside Value, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube
  (be sure to subscribe!)

• Book me to speak or host a workshop at your event, company or organization

• Check out our Value creation work over at Vivre Consulting

• Connect with me on LinkedIn!