Project description

Photos: Marcus Aurelius on Pexels and (insert) Matthew Henry on Burst

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

Achieving clear writing

With such larger applications, when you write, follow the most logical writing structure for the project, taking into account factors like: what makes it easy to quickly understand the model; the questions you know the assessor wants answered and the order; structures used in other parts of the application. 

Different things make different projects clear: describing the concrete parts of the work and what they do; focusing on a “walk through” for a service user, going from start to end in using the intervention; explaining how the objectives are implemented in the concrete, real world. 

Quality of development

If you are approaching a large funder for a grant of maybe £10k+, you definitely should show the application is at least low risk when they start thinking about the realities of projects. There’s nothing lost with showing it’s best practice and very well developed – and for some funders it might be important.

What are assessors looking for?

An important point to note here is that standards of trusts vary more than you might think. I worked with two charities that would have seemed to outsiders to work with similar service users to achieve similar aims, both medium or large organisations and based about a mile from each other. At one, project descriptions in proposals followed the “normal, recommended” approach – a description of the work where you could very clearly see who was doing what and to what standard. In the other, wherever possible, the project description was as brief as it possibly could be while just about describing the service, but more space was used for mini case studies that illustrated what the work was really like in practice. Both achieved funding in the mid £100,000s but they actually only had about 10% of their trust funders in common. I don’t know what would happen if you tried to wrench one organisation across to the other style of work, but I’d guess it wouldn’t be pretty.

That said, I do think there’s a kind of approach that seems to me to work with more funders, especially those with professional grants officers. This is what I’ll lay out. 

The following points from the ACF introductory assessor’s guide, might be of a little interest. It’s also worth having a checklist of common issues that you can run through, to check your project against.

Why?

• Why is your proposal a good response to the need? What difference will it make? Why are you the right people to do the work?

 Who?

• Who will be doing the work? Do they have the right skills, experience and enthusiasm? [Whilst you don’t want your post costed too high, if the cost is too low or the skillset is too diverse, the question would be: can you get someone of the calibre you need?]

What?

• What exactly do you plan to do with the grant? [A lack of clarity about the actual work, or how it relates to the need and outcomes, can be a reason for rejection, especially if it’s a badly written proposal. Some proposals – e.g., where there are last minute changes to the project, or two separate writers – end up with internal contradictions. Also: remember to include how the service users hear about the project.]
• What will the work cost, is this realistic and where will the rest of the money come from?
• What do you aim to achieve by the end of the grant period and how will you know if you have been successful?
• What risks are there and what might prevent the work from being successful?

 For large[r] grants, we may also want answers to more detailed questions – whether about the quality and realism of the proposal or the benefits it will deliver. Clearly not all questions are relevant to all funders but they may include:

Planning and development

• What have you learnt from your previous experience of this kind of work?[Still sadly very much a minority question, I’d say – as, sadly, with the next two questions and the other question on learning]
• How were service users or other relevant stakeholders involved in planning and developing your proposal?
• How have you taken account of equality of opportunity?
• Are there any special considerations (e.g. around the safety of users, volunteers or staff) and how will these be managed? [Although not everyone wants this, it’s becoming more common over time.]
• What have you learnt from others – and how will this work fit with what others are doing?
• How do you know your budget is realistic?
• How have you considered the broader context for your proposal e.g. its relationship to local government services?

 Delivery

• When will the work start? Is it time critical?
• Where will it take place? [if it’s not an eligibility issue, accessibility to the service users is usually the issue]
• How will beneficiaries or other stakeholders find out about/get involved in the work?
• Who is responsible for making sure the work is well-managed? [Key issues usually being: skills/experience and maybe fit with the team’s objectives if it looks an odd place to site the funded function]
• What support and training will be provided for volunteers and staff?

Other issues

Not included but also important, might be:

• The actual model of work and costs are all things you’d expect this trust to fund
• “Exit strategies” for what happens at the end of the grant (normally, how the work will continue to be funded) but that can be a concern for some trusts.

Key risks, especially

Given the lack of standard training for grants officers, it’s hard to generalise with confidence. However: you are looking for key risks, especially. That’s what many of the more professional grants officers will be focussing on, at least. Looking well put together can be a real positive. Beyond that: Gilly Green, a trainer for the Association of Charitable Foundations, remarks that trust fundraisers are actually harsher judges than grants officers. (Given some of the unusual rejection decisions we’ve each seen, on the other hand, perhaps our caution is understandable.)

You also need to be aware of the bigger risks specific to your sector. For example:

• Getting schools signed up is notoriously difficult. 
• There are specific pathways for employability, so projects that aren’t on them have to work to find clients. 
• Frail elderly people are culturally different. 
• Projects targeting single mothers face childcare issues. 
• Some Asian communities need extended engagement by disability projects to get large numbers of service users, due to cultural issues. 

…And so on. Even a generalist assessor will have picked up some of those issues.

Develop deep understanding of the work

If you are approaching a funder for a large grant who you know is a specialist or has very high standards or development, it’s well worth reading the toolkit(s) and even the service evaluations for that area of work that you can find online/in specialist libraries (e.g., the British Library). This means you can describe the service in best practice terms. That may sound extreme, but if you think you should do, say, three times as much work on a long form for 20 times as much money, you may not be working according to the value of the opportunity. It is also much harder to write if you don’t really understand the work.

I’d recommend learning about how services work, if you plan a career in trust fundraising. You will never un-learn these points and over time, your writing will deepen.

A better understanding of the work will help you communicate its quality to the funder. To address two sides to this:

• You’ll be able to show that the model of work you chose is the best fit. (This point is actually a bit broader than just the project it goes to the needs and benefits, too.) There are lots of ways to deliver a particular kind of service and if you can show that the way you’ve chosen is the most congruent with the situation, you’re communicating expertise and that you’ve made good choices. For example: half of us, maybe, are at charities delivering information and advice – but WHAT, precisely?
  • A service that is information-focused probably achieves the greatest cost:benefits, because the input of the staff is so low. Some research could bring this out.
  • Conversely, an advice service where you’re representing people is empowering for especially disempowered individuals.
  • A service where advice sits alongside more coaching-style models of work (such as “GROW” coaching) will build confidence more and fit better with a partly psychological presentation of the situation.

Understanding the options will give you the chance to ask the right questions, giving you the chance to build a more tailored application.

• You’ll know the key points to cover to show you are following best practice. With a true expert funder, just dropping these in quietly signals that you’re operating on a high level.

However, if you’re thinking of asking your Service Manager profound questions about the project, do be aware that doing so can slightly backfire on you, sometimes. When they are in unfamiliar territory dealing with a difficult issue, some service managers can start holding onto the issue and take a very long time to decide what to do. That’s particularly true if you’ve been talking about how an expert (who wrote your project toolkit) thinks there’s a potential problem with the project model that the Service Manager is inventing. Your aim is to get the best possible application off on time with an appropriate level of efficiency, which involves trade-offs. Sometimes, if you think the assessor won’t notice the issue, it’s better to wait until the project has got funded before raising your good practice issue!

“It’s a safe service because we’ve done it before”

It is much easier to pick apart a new service than a good existing one, because the results speak for themselves. For this reason, there are arguments for bringing out ways that the service isn’t revolutionary for your charity but reflects your experience and ways of working.

This is a skill – cutting the project up into bits that are “kind of” what you used to do, then showing you understand the differences and how it’s all stuck together (or that those are easy).

Don’t claim to do everything

Hyperbole is criticised in other books on trust fundraising. (US text Karsh and Fox, (2019) The Only Grant-Writing Book You’ll Ever Need, Basic Books describes grandiose claims as ‘provoking laughter and head-shaking amongst grant-makers’. Maybe.) 

Referring to the limits of your service, on the other hand, is not only fair to the funder, it also enhances your credibility with the reader by suggesting a more honest approach. (Goldstein, N. et al, Yes! 60 secrets from the science of persuasion, 2017. A claim in behavioural economics books is that you should admit your product’s small weaknesses in the process of pointing out its larger attractive features. Marketeer and behavioural economist Richard Shotton actually suggested this approach to us in a trusts conference organised by Fundraising Everywhere.) 

Unrealistic scope of a project for the skills/resources is also a common reason for project failure in the literature, so assessors may have spotted this.

Where your project doesn’t deliver an intervention to address a service user’s issue, it may be better to say you refer on to another service that does. Otherwise, apart from the partnerships/fit in the field section of the project description, you’d be better minimising references to other services. (As professor in influence Robert Cialdini says, it’s like a novel including a list of books just like it on the back cover, rather than enticing you to read it.)

Some points of detail in the draft:

•  If you can tie the money to making a specific difference, it will definitely appeal to some people. In the Fundraising Everywhere grants boards, this came up regularly and I’ve seen it elsewhere. We all know plenty of funders will give you a pass without that, but there are times it will make a difference.
• Objective(s) of the project are useful to include early on – they show the reader where it’s all going and show you know, yourself. If you’re struggling, you can derive these from aggregating the outcomes.
• However, otherwise, a good project description is normally very concrete. It’s easier to follow and avoids being seen as vague. Chip and Dan Heath also claim it’s more memorable, in their book Made to Stick. I could picture an advice worker, who helps 16-18s with substance misuse problems who are not in education or training, to critique their CVs. However, a “project that facilitates the soft skills and job readiness of young people who are further from the labour market” could be all kinds of things.
• Regarding equalities issues: I’d avoid making any assumptions that the trusts are signed up to liberal/socialist/progressive agendas. This can be harder than it sounds, occasionally, because we tend to be pretty steeped in them. Most trusts don’t especially look to hear about inclusion in this sense. If I need to cover this (e.g., it’s a target for the project, or it just feels right) I would need an evidenced and common sense reason why. Some of the largest trusts are more liberal/socialist, but there are still debates as to the best approach to inclusion – so what you say should still be justified. It’s also worth being aware that the books about “what it’s like in a trust” have a lot of discussions about trustees being less liberal/progressive than the staff you’ve been talking to. There has been more discussion of BAME issues in Trust & Foundation News since Black Lives matter. As I write (August 2021) it’s not yet clear how far grant making might have actually changed, at least at the large trust end of the market. Moving onto answering a specific equalities question: this will normally be looking for an answer in terms of the main equalities groups (BAME, gender, age, disability, LGBTQIA). 
• Usability and desirability: one criticism I’d have of a lot of services in our sector is that if you applied the tests of the discipline of Service Design, they’d fail in a surprising number of respects. There are understandable reasons why, but if your service doesn’t, it makes sense to highlight that. To pick common weaknesses:
  • Usability: a lot of services are only usable for a proportion of the target group. Examples: they’re only open during office hours; you’d have to queue for an hour to get access; if it’s a mental health service, you can’t use it if you have an addiction (a significant minority of the potential service user group); the service only comes by every so often, meaning a lot of people miss it.
  • Desirability: It’s slightly stigmatising to be going into the service; you’re surrounded by people you wouldn’t choose to mix with if they didn’t happen to share your condition; the surroundings are a bit shoddy; there’s some sense of “doing for” rather than serving customers by giving them exactly what they want; the people delivering the service, although they’re very good people, are from very different backgrounds and you don’t 100% identify with / feel 100% comfortable with them.

I don’t want to lay into our whole sector, which does amazing, transformative things within tight constraints. All I mean to say is that, if you can see that your service model has managed to avoid some of the more common problems, why not highlight its strengths?