Anna co-authored the book ‘Future by Us’, is a former editor of Australia’s largest student paper and is a regular speaker, blogger and opinion writer on climate and energy issues. In 2005 Anna was a representative to the U.N. Kyoto Protocol negotiations in Montreal and in 2007 was a delegate to the UN Secretary General’s Meeting on Climate Change. In 2008 she was a participant in the Australia 2010 Summit and in 2010 she led a delegation of 30 young Australians to the UN Copenhagen negotiations.

Anna has spent significant time in the United States, including studying at Cornell law school and volunteering on Obama’s Presidential campaign. She holds a 1st class honours degree in Arts (Asian Studies)/ Law from the University of Sydney, is a Fellow of the International Youth Foundation, sits on the board of the Foundation for Young Australians’ ‘Young Social Pioneers’ Program, and holds an Australian Leadership Award from Australian-Davos connection. Anna was named one of Sydney’s 100 Most Influential People by the Sydney Morning Herald and recently received the Sierra Club’s Earthcare Award for International Environmental Conservation.

Anna is currently working as a senior campaigning specialist at strategy and communications consultancy Make Believe and is a Churchill Fellow for 2011.

There’s an age-old debate about demand and supply: does demand create supply or does supply create demand? Most people believe that demand creates supply – but let’s consider where innovation fits in. Sometimes, innovation occurs within an existing demand that customers or citizens are calling for. But sometimes, your innovation, idea or project doesn’t sit within any kind of existing demand.

This is the difference between evolutions and revolutions.

An evolutionary approach is when your product, organisation or service is sufficiently similar to an existing product category for people to understand what you’re doing, but different enough for people to consider it a different product, service or organisation.

A revolutionary approach doesn’t sit within an existing category. People need to be sold not only your brand and your product but the actual category or market that your product or service sits on.

The importance of making this distinction comes down to understanding risk.

If you’re trying to get a group of people to do something within an existing behaviour, but just get them to do it slightly differently (e.g. change their brand of washing powder), it’s a much easier sell. But if you’re trying to change people’s behaviour completely (e.g. ask them to wash their clothes by hand), there’s a much larger risk.

People are always the most complicated ingredient in any campaign or business. People are irrational! So whether you’re designing a product or a campaign, be mindful of what you’re asking your followers to do. When you’re formulating your new idea, ask, ‘what am I asking of my followers?’ and think about evolutions or revolutions.

There’s a lot more to entrepreneurship than just having a better product or a better service. Ideas are the starting point, but without successful execution, your idea will stay just that – an idea, not a reality. For example, there are 500 patents registered for new mousetrap designs that are all objectively better than the mouse trap that most people use – but none of them have been successful in taking over the market.

What sorts of incentives should you consider when talking to entrepreneurs? If you’re approaching an entrepreneur who started a successful business, focus on things they’re interested in, like business and new projects, new ventures, new ideas. A pitch involving the entrepreneurial elements of your project will work much better than the pitch designed for a large, risk-adverse corporate.

Government

How about if you’re pitching to a Government department? One consideration to take into account is that government employees don’t stand to directly gain from any decisions that they make. Unlike in the corporate world, they don’t have a bonus structure; they don’t get paid more for working longer hours, or for bringing in deals and finding new, exciting organisations to support.

The best approach when working with government is usually a risk mitigation strategy. That is, if you’ve received funding from a slightly smaller government department, you’re more likely to receive support from bigger departments. So, start applying for small local government grants, get a few over the line, get some experience under your belt in pitching and grant writing, and work your way up to pitching to bigger Government departments.

Corporates

Corporations often face huge costs when considering projects because they have an integration cost – an administration cost involved in taking on a new organisation to support. You may be asking for just a small sum of money or a small amount of pro bono time, but in a large corporate system the administrative costs may be significantly more than the amount of money you’re asking for.

This means you should only approach corporates that you feel are looking for opportunities to support an organisation of approximately your size. Before writing a large grant application, just organise a meeting with one of the selection panel and have a chat to them about what they are looking for.

Secondly, make it easy for them to make the decision (i.e. show how you fit their selection criteria) and do what you can to make their integration and administration costs as low as possible.

Not-for-Profits

You can also ask not-for-profit organisations to support your work in many different ways. For example, if you can’t afford office space, you could ask a larger not-for-profit to spare a desk in their building for a few months. Or maybe they could let some of your team come along to one of their training days, so you can skill up your team for free.