Testimonials of Success

When I met Anna, I was 6 months into founding Uplifters, an NGO dedicated to online education of migrant workers in South East Asia. We were a volunteer organisation, and most of the capital came from my personal savings and individual donations. I was fully dedicated and passionate about my mission but it was difficult to find funding to evolve into a staff-led structure. Individual donations were irregular and not enough to pay office rent and hire permanent staff without whom, in the long run, I knew I could not sustain. Anna gave me an in-depth insight on the types of donors I needed to approach to ask for core funding and what was vital to prepare in advance in order to pass the first stage of contact making to being invited to a personal meeting. At that time, I did use a synthesised pitch deck for all my fundraising endeavors, and a basic project budget. Within the coming months, Anna actively supported my fundraising efforts, advised and prepared strategic background documents such as our theory of change and engaged in donor research. She coached me through donor meetings which gave me more confidence to defend my cause. She was an amazing support when it came up to budgeting and finances: thanks to her ability to make complex tasks less difficult, I set up an overall 3-years organisational budget and disposed of several necessary tools to be prepared to run a staff-led organisation. When I was finally introduced to the right donor, I was ready to convince, receive and manage multi-year core funding and shift to a staff-led organsiation. Today, we are a small but well-known and reputable ally for the empowerment of domestic workers in Hong Kong and South East Asia.