Deepening your analysis

Photos: Ned Horton on FreeImages and (insert) Sarah Pflug on Burst

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

Look more deeply into more years’ grants

It’s possible to be misled by what some trusts say, that there is a lot of change and response to fashion in the sector. Okay, it happens – a funder I was involved in got excited by black, Asian and minority ethnic projects in the aftermath of Black Lives Matter and there’s been more in Trust and Foundation news about that issue (just as there’s been more about the environment since Extinction Rebellion). However, there may only be a very limited fraction of the giving that’s responding to these new issues. If you look beneath that, there’s a huge amount of business as usual.

As research projects by academics interviewing trust directors have shown, trusts generally do things according to their own established logic, values and framework. A lot if mechanistic, following in long histories of past decisions and with an established worldview. That makes them relatively predictable, IF you know enough. 

I attended a talk by a very successful trust fundraiser who’d upgraded giving using major donor-type techniques and really tried to put him on the spot about what he really knew was going on. The point he fell back on was: because of all the conversations he had, he knew the funder a lot better. No doubt there were other important things going on for him – but knowledge IS power and you can get that knowledge in other ways. 

Get the most out of your reading

This section gives advice if you find your research isn’t getting to the bottom of the trust.

SQ3R method

There are a variety of reading methods that reduce your chance of glazing over and lifting your head from the text without having learnt anything, This one works for me:

• Skim – Note the headings, read the key opening paragraphs without going any further
• Questions – Think of questions about what you need to know
• Read – FundingInfo can be a good way to orientate yourself. However, if there’s time, it’s worth reading everything.
• Recite – recite what you’ve read, putting it into your own words
• Review your notes, spotting additional points you missed

Be systematic in your coverage

Some trust fundraisers are prone to missing obvious points. Everyone does it sometimes and when the funder really matters, it’s worth spending the time eliminating that risk.

Attached is a pro forma I like to fill in, to ensure I’ve covered all the ground, generally. You might want to tweak it for your particular area of work.

[Pro forma]

If you’ve come up from just doing smaller trusts, you’ll absolutely need to be looking at more than a year’s grants in the accounts (which some fundraisers have got away with in more junior roles).

Realize what you don’t know

If you assume you know all about a funder, the chances are you’re deluding yourself. Even grants officers can’t answer all the questions. When you REALLY need to understand a funder and you’ve got time to do so, how do you spot what the unanswered questions are? A few ideas:

• Look for ambiguities/different meanings in relevant criteria. Think like a lawyer. Most trusts aren’t that skilled in communication. There are 100 interpretations of “social welfare” or “community” and even when one is most obvious, it may not be the one the trust means (e.g., funders of “health” making grants to services that increase the independence of disabled people).
• Can you spot the hidden criteria that the trust is applying? My own experience assessing matches what I and others (e.g., Fundraising Everywhere’s 2020 conference) have seen when setting up simulated grants panels. The published criteria are too broad to fully whittle the list of applications down and so funders have hidden policies they apply, that enable them to make choices more quickly. (Not all of these are even conscious, as you’ll occasionally notice on the phone to the trust.) Like any rules, you can work a lot of these out if you’re experienced enough and there is enough evidence of practice.
• Think about the diversity of policy that could fit with the choice of meaning. A trust could be promoting the arts to young people for educational reasons, to engage disaffected young people or for more therapeutic reasons.
• Try roughing out the application your were thinking of making for maybe 20 minutes, or imagine you’re explaining the application to the funder. What questions start to come up?

Evaluating the gaps in your knowledge

You know you don’t know everything. Your job at this stage is to manage the risks you face – evaluating how much these points matter, judging what’s realistic to do and then taking a view as to what’s a good use of your time from hereon in:

• Does this particular question matter? You can sometimes cut a few more corners when the trust is relatively available than when things are fiercely competitive.
• Is it easy enough to get an answer? For example, you might apply examples of grants or ask the trust.
• What would you think about applying common generalizations – is that acceptable or too big a risk in this case?
• Are one-off grants confusing you and hiding the answer? Trusts have people with individual interests, or personal contacts, or one-off reasons for doing something that is fairly outside policy.

It’s easy to get pulled into keeping going at this stage by the “sunk cost fallacy”. You’ve possibly already spent half a day on this funder. You want to show your manager you’re productive and feel good that there’s plenty going out. However, as regards the best use of your time to raise the most money, the fact you’ve been at it for a while is, strictly speaking, irrelevant.It might be best to do a very “quick and dirty” application if you think that’s possible. Alternatively, if you’ve got a lot to do yet before a proposal goes out, it may still be better to cut your losses and move on.

Spotting opportunities from extra income

Trust fundraising guru Bill Bruty has a very interesting report on his Fundraising Training web site, under the Brutal Facts section. Titled Fine Margins: Stewardship or Luck?  It looks at variations in grantmaking. Some key points are:

• 91% of grantmaking doesn’t fluctuate very much by year, but ⅔ of trusts HAD significantly increased their giving at some point – on average, 4.5 times over 14 years.
• The extra cash usually turned into grant making – apparently decided on in the year, or later, after receipt of the money. It was almost always given to a few recipients in six figure (or larger) grants. 
• These were grants usually out of the blue, to new names, which may or may not be in the same field of work as the trust’s grant making areas. A lot of recipients eren’t normal fundraising charities.
• Of most interest (because they were fundraising charities) were the occasional intermittent recipients of major grants, when extra moneys are available. Bill doesn’t say this, but – the few times I’ve seen anything like this, there’s been an active relationship between the grant maker and the recipient.

What this seems to mean is:

• Look at the change in income in the most recent accounts as well as everything else. In the odd case (a bit under 1 case in 10) you might spot a significant increase. This will often presage a splurge in spending, mostly likely in a few very large grants and very likely to new recipients.
• Bill’s suspicion is that ‘to give big, you need a “safe home” for the money; and, you will be concerned about distorting or creating a dependency within the grant recipient. You also probably want a clear and immediate impact from your funding.’
• The extra money usually seems to have gone to:
  • An Institution, like the University of Manchester or the Royal College of Music 
  • An Initiative newly created for a specific purpose, like Participatory City 
  • Something topical, like Oxfam’s 2010 East Africa Disaster Appeal
  • A Research Programme, like the Institute of Cancer Research
  • A Building

…and definitely not to a smaller, “business as usual” ask.

• Even if there’s a potential funding opportunity, it wasn’t clear from the research that you could make an approach for the money or that you can come in at that stage, rather than being “one the radar” for years past. However, as a fundraiser, it must be of interest!

This is all detailed on Bill’s web site. His company Fundraising Training also runs specific training courses on analysing accounts in depth.

Accountability and transparency

You might just be interested to read the Trust’s score for accountability and transparency in the Foundation Practice Rating 2022 report.