Growing revenue and expanding the donor base

Students and alumni advisors from Team Malawi are honored to have the opportunity for our social consulting team to collaborate with Fisherman’s Rest to develop an actionable strategic plan for revenue growth and donor base expansion. The project will concentrate on two areas:

● Generating revenue from existing services provided by Fisherman’s Rest

● Increasing donations from individuals, crowdfunding, and grants.

Revenue generation

Fisherman’s Rest manages thousands of water handpumps in Blantyre District, which includes T/A Somba. However, this is a small number compared to other nonprofit organizations and the government, which manage tens of thousands of handpumps around the country. In Malawi, as in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, a significant number of water handpumps are broken due to a lack of maintenance.

The common challenge is that preventive maintenance and repairs after breakdowns may be extremely time-consuming due to the current handpump design, which lacks modularity, and, in the worst-case scenario, requires almost complete dismantling to fix a relatively minor breakdown. Fisherman’s Rest has been systematically studying the handpumps and experimenting with their design to add modularity and increase durability. Moreover, the organization is piloting the local production of spare parts in Malawi using 3-D printing and local manufacturers. The organization’s goal is to become a parts and service supplier to other NGOs and the community, increasing water flow by reducing handpump downtime. While this is a potentially sustainable source of revenue, the organization needs a market analysis to estimate demand and a cost-benefit analysis to assess its viability.

Donor base expansion

Most of Fisherman’s Rest’s projects depend on donations, primarily from corporations. While corporate donations help fund new philanthropic initiatives, they are unreliable for long-term sustainability due to donor fatigue and shifts in corporate social responsibility priorities.

Therefore, Fisherman’s Rest would benefit from developing a strategic marketing plan to grow its individual donor base—people who contribute small amounts regularly to support its projects. The organization also wants to explore opportunities to access grants and crowdfunding platforms to raise additional funds more effectively, considering its limited fundraising capacity.