Case studies

Photos: Seth Doyle and (inset) Christin Hume, on Unsplash

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

Choosing the right case study

I normally say to Services that a good case study is someone who:

Got significant benefits that are clearly attributable to the service
Started out with real problems that we addressed
Speaks well, as a case study will be more credible if it’s in the person’s own words. If the case study is of a child, it would be the parent who speaks well
Ideally, is also from a particularly sympathetic group, such as young people

That’s the order of priority, for me (though I know my direct marketing colleagues would put a sympathetic service user at the top – so, maybe I’m wrong.)

Preparing the subject for the interview

I start off by explaining what we’re doing and by giving the structure of the meeting:

A little bit about them: rough age, what they were doing in your life before injury; a few words on how you got injured
If it’s a longer case study, a bit more about them as a person
What your service helped them with:
What was the issue he gave help on? How did he help?
How was the service user’s life a bit better off as a result?
What was the situation beforehand?
The next service (or bit of advice, say) that they used – same format (it tends to give good, specific information)
… and so on
What’s their situation in life, now?
Degree of anonymity and sign-off by you

I think it’s worth getting the service user up to speed like this – they will often want to think about what to say before the meeting. If they’ve thought about it, they will come with more ideas to help you get what you need.

Write-ups

If I had two criticisms of most case studies I’ve seen in trust proposals, they would be:

They sound too generic, which slightly undermines their credibility. The subject of the case study doesn’t sound like a unique individual with unique challenges. A case study needs both to be universal (or, universal enough) in terms of the needs and benefits to be representative and to move the reader to act, whilst still coming through as an individual, not a cipher.
They aren’t as emotionally powerful as they could be. Sited at the end of a proposal, this is your bid chance to really move the assessor/trustees, who by this point have hopefully bought into the idea intellectually and are more emotionally open. However, trust fundraisers don’t seem to know how to do this. There are lots of ideas about doing this in the Writing Powerfully videos in the general Writing Skills sub-menu.