Reflecting the realities of projects

This webpage is for trust fundraisers with three or more years’ experience. Beginners should use this page instead.

Get ready for the most common approach to assessment: generic assessments

A lot of the questions trusts ask are generic and there will be different levels of questioning, depending on the time the trust puts into the assessment.

We are talking about generic issues that you could consider for any project. It’s a “black box” approach to the work. As an assessor you don’t have to understand the project in the box, but if you can see the right things going in and hear it has the right qualities about it, you can assume that the project in the box is going to deliver.

Some general questions from the ACF’s introductory guide to assessment are woven into the advice for individual sections to the application.

What issues to focus on and what standard to go for

There are little glitches in a project that are easy to iron out as you implement the work, or which won’t prejudice excellent outcomes and then at the other extreme there are projects that are doomed from the start. It’s about hitting the right standard for your list of target trusts. There are different levels of quality and development of the proposed work that different trusts look for, but generally they aren’t looking to find just any small fault in your service.

Liz Firth argues (in the ACF’s basic guide to assessments) that trusts should be looking for (to paraphrase) ‘confidence that proposed work can deliver the benefits we want to support’. Following that approach, as Gilly Green, trainer for the ACF’s basic assessor’s training course, said: assessors should look for significant risks.

That is a good minimum standard to try for. If you can get out of Services, a much higher quality project, in this sense, then you will be suitable for very demanding funders (or those who lack clarity about where to stop).

Let’s assume that we are talking about a “typical” larger trust that is looking for a fairly well-developed project, rather than excellence. The assessor’s attention is likely to be around where someone with a little knowledge would think the real risks are. If the concern is, in the ACF’s words, the ‘proposed work can deliver the benefits we want to support,’ only some issues are key.

For example:

• As a study of North East funders found, a large national charity looking to introduce a new service in a local area may be particularly scrutinized less for quality but more for how the work fits in to the local ecology of service provision for that field of work.
• A project that is planning to keep much the same resources but do a lot more work than previously will probably be looked at regarding capacity.
• If you work in a field, such as employability, where there are well established pathways through services for the people in need, an obvious question is: can you get the clients?
• If you’re a long way from your funding target and the trust is only going to make a limited contribution, whether you can secure the rest is an obvious risk.

As Chapman found in his study of North East funders, the degree of scrutiny is very dependent on the size of grant. If you’re a big charity asking for a small grant for well-established work, you’d be unlucky if there are issues. At the other extreme, if it’s a serious request for hundreds of thousands of pounds and I haven’t personally spent days thinking about weaknesses, I’d be worried.

An ACF assessment training session I attended, was told that a group of trust fundraisers the trainer had also trained in assessment techniques had been more stringent and demanding than any group she’d dome the course with. (You can see it as an assessor when you assess something sent by a trust fundraiser – if you meet the project, there are more ready answers to your questions.)

Remember that when you’re losing sleep over the subtle potential flaws in the project. They may never be spotted by a generalist assessor who has one or a few hours to get up to speed, assess and write a report on your project.

A lot of work turns on a few decisions, so it’s sensible that we are risk averse. At the same time, getting a proposal done is a balancing act, taking in your time, what Services can reasonably do, and when.

How to spot the relevant standard to development: general points

• Look at assessors’ checklists (I wove one or two checklists into the pages for individual sections of a proposal) and try to see what is an obvious concern.
• Look at practice materials in the field and identify the key points for success. If you expect a high standard of assessment, then at least the more obvious questions might come up.
• Ask the service manager what the grounds would be for rejecting the project, if they can think of any (making clear that your plan is to tighten up the application so that it’s positively written and the issue doesn’t come up).
• Don’t make too many assumptions about whether you have made a convincing case. A mere lack of sleep makes people worse at distinguishing credible statements from faulty ones. It is a good idea to get a second opinion when you have written the application.

It’s also worth considering the literature on why projects fail. (As before, you might also think which issues funders might actually be able to spot at this stage.)

• Inaccurate requirements gathering (as an assessor, I might worry if the proposal was for a poorly researched new project)
• Change in project objectives (warning signs: the charity seems unsure what it’s doing)
• Inadequate vision or goal for the project (likely to manifest as a lack of clarity in the proposal)
• Inaccurate cost estimates (might show as a budget that looks out of line with others the assessor has seen for similar work)
• Undefined opportunities and risks (likely to manifest as: a poorly worked-up project)
• Inaccurate task time estimate (likely to manifest as: targets look extremely high with no explanation; project involves work that the charity is unlikely to really understand)
• Resource dependency (likely to manifest as: the project is highly dependent on a changeable outside factor, such as another obviously time-limited project)
• Inadequate resource forecasting (likely to manifest as: a poorly worked-up project, especially in a new area of work)
• Limited/taxed resources likely to manifest as: targets look extremely high with no explanation)
• Inexperienced project manager (with limited internal support)

Again, remember: it’s not any small issue, but normally if it looks a genuine, significant risk.

Key risks in different areas of work

The following are some key risks in different areas of work (I’ll gradually expand this list over time):

Capital projects

• Costings need to be up to date (building inflation)
• Unpredictable costs for refurbishment of buildings, especially older ones
• Keeping the package of funding together over time. The targets can be so big, they may not seem achievable

Arts, Culture, Heritage

• Sustainability of community arts projects

Education & training

• How do you get teachers to talk to you?
• Is the project really about advising and training a statutory (i.e., school staff)?
• How do you get access to unemployed people (if that’s the group)? There tend to be established routes
• Being additional to the statutory offer comes up more than some areas of work

Emergency response/relief

• The situations can be so fluid, especially earlier on: how will the charity deal with it?

Health

• Hospices – how far is the service really respite care, dressed up as something else?
• Preventative health – how to ensure take-up

Homelessness

• In projects working with homeless people, the realistic measures of change for some service users can be quite small, but other people are more able to move on

Medical Research

• It can be some way from actually changing lives
• Projects may not work

Social Welfare

• Disability projects working with BAME groups – how to engage
• Older people’s services – how to address the tendency amongst “silent|” to accept any service they are offered, uncritically
• Projects involving personal budgets – challenge of putting together packages of work that statutories will fund; it’s a lot more work than you’d expect; unsuitability of care staff to deliver more entrepreneurial work
• Severe disabilities – high costs (high staffing ratios)
• Addiction projects – high rates of relapse
• Employability / employment training projects – accessing service users
• Projects working with alienated young people – engagement
• Advice projects – proving impacts
• Mentoring – the time taken to recruit mentors who match the mentees precisely enough

Service user-led initiatives

• Perceptions as amateurish
• Getting staff to engage with service user involvement structures
• Finding common ground between service users and staff

BAME projects

• Perceptions that they don’t have greater needs / can or can’t be worked with by mainstream services