If you thought all you needed to do was apply for grants and sit back waiting while your whole life, dream and career hangs in the balance, decided on by some funding panel. Think again.
Take back control. Get yourself a strategy that is easy to follow, gives you stability and will help the grants get approved while gaining extra income and building a community for your CIC to serve.
As you know I’m not one to keep these tricks to myself so I’m going share with you my CIC launch strategy.
Let’s start with what is a ‘launch strategy’. It’s when you spend a couple of weeks on a campaign, all planned out and carefully designed with the aim to recruit new members (paid or unpaid) to your CIC community.
These new community members will sign up to your mailing/contact lists. Joining your cic beneficiaries and hopfully becoming participants in your cic activities.
You need a community. And a community that you can contact and and in a place where you can regularly engage with them via what’s app, email, social media, fb groups, your website etc.
What you don’t want it a cic with no community or one that has to hunt for people every time you run an activity.
By having a community in one virtual place you can do all sorts;
Give them surveys
Invite them to events
Give them resources
They can talk to and support each other
Tell funders the number you have which makes you look good etc
Now you may have grown a decent number gradually. By posting on social media, networking, and having events. And that’s great but it’s actually harder work having this ‘evergreen’ model. Evergreen is a term used if your membership is open all the time and you work on a steady trickle all the time.
An alternative to the evergreen strategy is ‘launching’. With a launch you have an intensive burst of output on social media, events, emails etc and you create an irresistible offer and a deadline to join/buy. This delivers a charge for the door.
It’s a great way to organise yourself.
You could schedule two or three per year. A launch could have many different end goals;
To deliver a training course
To join a membership
To sell/distribute for free a product
To fill an event
To grow your community base/network
A launch could be used to gain a community engagement report. Adding numbers to a mailing list, getting surveys and interviews done, filling a steering group on zoom to design a project. All giving you stats and evidence to tell funders who want to know if you have talked to your community.
A launch could be part of a grant funded project. You could do a launch that leads to a series of workshops or events. Using the grant money to fund publicity, marketing etc.
Or a launch could be used to bring in alternatives to grant fund income. This is really important and will be a game changer.
Say for example you have 20 paying members signed up to a little membership paying £10pm. You deliver a zoom support group call monthly, provide resources and a community of people that can support each other. So that’s a cool £200 coming into your CIC each month. That can cover your monthly insurance, website, or go to you for your work. Grow on that and get to 100 members so you have £1000pm coming in. Imagine an extra 1k going to your wages each month. That really makes a difference.
Always add tiers to your memberships. I recommend a free level, low paid level and high ticket.
Scaling on from this you could do a launch for annual membership, maybe some live training or a physical product as a bonus. Adding bonuses and creating an irritable package is a great way to get people in. By doing it this way you gain a larger amount of money in one bulk payment. This could be enough to fund a project or match with a grant. This will make you so much more speaking to grant funders. They love it when you have other sustainable money coming in.
The next important feature of a launch is a deadline. You have got to create urgency and have your offer on a deadline. Offer ends in 7 days time! This means they need to sign up.
Launching is a game changing skill you should learn.
To help you I am doing a free 4 part live training programme for all my cic tribe and vip members. Starting May 9th. It’s a challenge we’re I guide you to launch a membership in your CIC.
To join rsvp in the cic tribe app or message me for the fb page link 🫶🏼
I can’t wait to see what you achieve.
Kexx