Building Supportive Constituencies

  • Engage key constituencies in the planning process. If stakeholders are included in the planning process, their participation should be real, not pro forma, to reap the full benefit of their involvement. Don’t, as one grantmaker put it, “have a plan and then bring people together to plan.”
  • Open doors for the start-up and its organizers. Grantmakers often have access to networks through which start-ups can get advice, support, and visibility. 
  • Sponsor activities that build skills. “We took groups of people — young people, students, community leaders, parents, public officials — through a two-year leadership development program. They learned about youth development. They learned about collaborating and program design. We ran several rounds of these sessions. What happens is, when you have three or four hundred people who have been through a similar process, you get a critical mass of people who understand the same language, who have some of the same kinds of experiences, who have some of the same values.”

Takeaways are critical, bite-sized resources either excerpted from our guides or written by Candid Learning for Funders using the guide's research data or themes post-publication. Attribution is given if the takeaway is a quotation.

This takeaway was derived from Working with Start-Ups.

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