Discussion Questions

At the end of the workshop, participants and facilitators engaged in a lively Q&A around the workshop’s core themes, as well as questions that were arising for participants as they considered how to put the workshop’s learnings into practice in their own organizations. The following are some of the core questions that came up, as well as the responses that came from the people present. If you have your own thoughts, questions or comments to add, please feel free to do so using the “reply” box at the bottom of this page, or bring them up in the Wealth Creation Community of Practice.

• Questions
  • Answers/Responses

• How do I figure out who the key decision maker is?
  • Network, and be clear what you’re looking for – talk to your Board, influential folks in the community
  • Go in with your hypothesis and ASK

• How can we cross-pollinate between the networks in this room in order to present a more attractive “impact seller”?
  • Share intelligence and best practices, but also do coordinated work
  • CAN members and partners need to share what they know about local foods, and be open regarding whom they’re trying to talk to
  • Share connections, be open
  • What’s your value proposition to partners?

• When we’re still capacity-building, when/how do we approach impact buyers?
  • Start having conversations with potential impact buyers now, figure out what their needs are, then know you have funders as partners to help you reach necessary scale

• How can we practice and model this?(in a very structured way)
  • Use selling impact as a set of stakeholder engagement questions

• This model applies very well to community foundations, because we’re local, and are both grantees and donors at the same time. But there are some questions specific to us…
  • How can we use our investing to help grantees “sell their impact”?
  • How can community foundations use selling impact to serve our donors?

• How do we juggle all these different languages?
  • Start with existing impact buyers, and go back in through the front door
  • Ask: what could we do to be more useful to you?
  • See the world through the eyes of your critics – your opposites, other sectors

What else is coming up for you?

• Need support for measurement staff, especially with this additional set of measurements to make
• This is a new conversation, w/ a new audience, and we’ll need time and help to build capacity to get there
• How can we find a way to tap the resources in these networks?
• Need help with how to talk to business partners, help them do the flip side of “The End of Fundraising”