We helped EIT Climate-KIC, an EU-based agency, reframe their donor pitch in order to appeal to a new generation of partners.
EIT Climate-KIC, is an EU-based knowledge and innovation community working towards mitigating the effects of climate change and creating a circular, zero-carbon economy.
Hot new topic
As the scale of disruption (and destruction) caused by climate change becomes clear to many in Europe, more and more people, companies and organisations are lining up to change things for the better. Thanks to organisations like EIT Climate-KIC (CKIC), these volunteers and partners find new ways to organise and contribute, making changes big and small to natural resource management, city planning or financing.
These new projects, however, require multiple sources of funding. Formerly dependent on EU funds, CKIC has had to diversify its funding portfolio, working with government actors and private donors as well as its traditional EU partners. In order to negotiate that shift, CKIC called on Creative Supply to help adjust their donor strategy.
“Creative Supply was recommended to us for their expertise in storytelling. They helped us simplify and strengthen Climate KIC’s narrative and messages. Their approach is structured and inclusive and allowed us to quickly reach internal alignment about our communication priorities. If you want to use storytelling to boost your communication, I can strongly recommend them.”
, Climate Activist and Entrepreneur
Preaching to the (right) choir
Over the course of a week-long seminar, Creative Supply worked with the CKIC team to reveal, reorganise and refine the elements needed to strengthen their donor pitch. Acting sometimes as moderators, sometimes as sounding boards, and sometimes as image specialists, we strove to break down the extensive knowledge of the CKIC team into simple, digestible messaging blocks.
We used role-playing exercises to help CKIC adapt their pitch to a new audience, one with a different level of awareness about climate change, and different priorities on how best to participate in the fight against it. After multiple rounds of peer review, we were able to see new messaging structures emerge, that ultimately transformed into a new, modular donor pitch. And on the last day, we helped the CKIC team set out a timeline for implementation, linking the project to other large-scale programmes within the organisation.
Key Takeaway
As consultants, we are often expected to come up with solutions to our customers’ problems. Sometimes, however, a project comes that forces us to step back, listen, and act as enablers rather than solution-finders. Organisations are full of knowledge, but sometimes that knowledge is hidden in people’s heads, or at the bottom of a report. When we can tap into that knowledge, effectively allowing our customers to come up with their own set of solutions, then everybody wins.
