Good Grant Fundraising

The ask

Photos: Run FFWPU and (inset) RODNAE Productions, on Pexels

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

A call to action

My advice is to finish the proposal strongly. You’re looking to energise and inspire the trustees, yet most proposals finish with the budget! Why not finish with an exciting call to arms?

Jay Heinrichs has a terrific tool for this in his video, The Secret to a Memorable Speech. He says:

  • You should be going for something about 12 seconds long if you said it (i.e., a long breath).
  • They have to reflect the speaker’s (in our case, the charity’s) character, sounding as if it’s coming straight from the heart.
  • The words themselves should be memorable – such as, using suitable figures of speech and tropes (see the Obama example, below).
  • You need a cause or purpose, some sort of call to action. In our case, it’s the call to give.

 

Some examples:

  • Barack Obama: ‘There is not a black America, a white America, a Latino America, an Asian America. There’s the United States of America.’
  • The film Braveheart: ‘Would you be willing to trade all our days, from this day to that, for one chance – just one chance – to come back here and tell our enemies… that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!’
  • Winston Churchill: ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.’

Trusts sometimes say they like to hear passion from the charity. When I write this bit, I try to do it with an emotional of pure passion for the cause.

Rhetoric is hard to do, so it’s something I do later in the writing. By then, I know the work and the key points very well. (It’s probably best to avoid florid rhetorical techniques, btw: plain language actually moves people more and it’s more in tone with a proposal.)

Hick’s law

Hick’s Law is a finding by psychologists that the more choices you give someone, the time it takes to choose increases logarithmically (i.e.,a lot when the number gets bigger). That means that if you start giving the trust different options, you quickly start putting the grants panel off. It’s not surprising that some trusts tell you they want you to tell them what you want.