Good Grant Fundraising

A huge website of free ideas and information

for trust fundraisers of all experience levels

Easily accessed by menus

Usefulness score given by very experienced

trust fundraisers:

60% “Quite useful”

40% “Extremely useful”

This website is about improving applications to charitable trusts and foundations for the work of charities. It is mainly for people working at UK charities.

It is a reservoir of over 100 pages of ideas, resources, videos and interviews, designed for trust fundraisers.

We did an evaluation of 13 pilot pages with 26 trust fundraisers, nearly all with five years experience or more. Asked to rate a full site of the same level of content for usefulness to themselves, 60% scored it “Quite useful” and 40% scored it “Extremely useful”.

The menu above is for trust fundraisers with a minimum of three solid years’ experience. if you’re a beginner, go to the basic pages.

What people say

‘A fantastic website, very comprehensive, discussing trust fundraising challenges, based both on practical experience and a lot of research. It’s invaluable if you need advice on a specific area of the work or want to keep progressing in your career and impact’ Suzy Duggan, Senior Trusts Officer at The Refuge Council

‘It’s incredibly comprehensive. If anyone created a trust fundraising second or third year degree module, you could base it on your site. It’s an amazing resource. We could all learn a lot from it.’ João Silva, Trusts Manager at Barnardo’s

There’s a huge amount of fascinating stuff. It covers a lot of ground and says clearly the things trust fundraisers and trainers don’t normally talk about. It’s really impressive.’ Heather Graham, Trusts & Major Gifts Manager, Heart of Kent Hospice

About the lead author of the site

A bid-writer (raising £15m) and occasional grants assessor since 1990, I have very broad experience. I have also managed, trained and mentored other trust fundraisers to succeed.

CONTRIBUTORS

Good Grant Fundraising. Learning across all aspects of the work

Over £15m raised personally

Over 110 projected funded

Approx. 70 Trust fundraisers trained and mentored

25 charities and 6 grant makers worked for

Content of the site

Writing proposals

30 pages of ideas covering philanthropic/behavioural psychology, storytelling, rhetoric, typesetting and more

Relationships

Engaging trusts, thanking, reporting, peer-to-peer techniques and ideas for creating the best experience

Trusts + Research

Understanding foundations, drawing on research and first person books rom around the globe. Little known research techniques.

Internal issues

Getting the projects and service detail you need; working with services and with senior management

Trusts team issues

The knowledge and skills you need to operate: from strategy to admin to ethics to managing staff to trouble shooting

Putting together new projects

Project management, service user involvement, grant assessment and other techniques for feasibility studies and supporting Services.

Get started, learning from the site

The menus at the top will take you to over 100 pages of content for experts. Broken down finely by topic, it will give you ideas on a vast range of important trust fundraising issues.

New to trust fundraising?

Don’t use the menu of pages above. It’s full of ideas which give experienced fundraisers an “A” game, enabling exceptional achievement and solving difficult problems – but they can be deeply confusing to beginners and waste a lot of time. The link below is for you.

BEGINNERS START HERE