Fundraising is hard work. We sympathize. You'll have hundreds of meetings with hundreds of potential partners, and there will be a whole lot of information you'll need to keep organized: contact information, when you need to followup with someone, what you said to whom, and what documentation you've shared. You need to organize your time effectively so you can juggle all of this, and you need good tools to help you do it. Excel is not enough.
While there are clear differences in the character of the work, fundraising and dealflow management share a lot of the same requirements. Instead of the central notion of a "deal", you have a "funder", and the end point of the funnel is an "LP" instead of an "investment", but otherwise, you still need to track tasks, contacts, and documents. You still need to work in teams. And you still want to be able to analyze the flow of opportunities you have ahead of you and make sense of the work you've done so far.
For many years we had created custom versions of Sevanta Dealflow for use in fundraising by our clients. For new funds in particular, we found that fundraising is the acute pain they need addressed right away, and dealflow management will follow shortly after. So we created Sevanta Fundflow as a pre-packaged offering with fields and reports for fundraising, but of course it is still highly configurable to meet your particular needs.
The essential user experience is very similar to Sevanta Dealflow, so your team will have no problem transitioning from one to the other. Once you've successfully closed your fund, you can focus on what you got into this for in the first place — investing. But we'll keep your Sevanta Fundflow system running indefinitely so you can continue to track your interactions with your limited partners. That way you can maintain a history of all your previous fundraising efforts for the next time you need to hit the road. Godspeed.
We do not charge extra for the fundraising service (more clearly, if a user has an account on both a Dealflow and Fundflow systems, we do not double-charge for that user). We started providing this service as a favor for our clients and have decided to continue to provide it at no charge as long as the incremental support and customization requirements are kept simple.
We hope that having this functionality available at no cost helps make it an easy decision to keep the system running even when you're not actively fundraising. Fundraising is an intense episodic project with quiet periods in between, but it's essential that the team always have a home for fundraising notes and contacts; this way you'll have good data to work with when you start actively raising your next fund.
