Work proportionate to its value

Photo: Matthew Henry and (insert) Shopify Partners, on Burst

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

If you’ve come up through doing smaller trusts, it’s easy to not really appreciate the need for great research, because it simply isn’t time efficient to be looking deeply into research. However, if you’re going to get ten times the grant, if you’re just doing twice the work, reading the most obvious stuff, are you really working proportionate to the value of the opportunity?

I’d say that as the grants get bigger, you need to move from a relatively mechanical approach – “Does the trust do this?” “Does it do that?” if it ticks those boxes, then send an application – more and more towards really understanding the funder. That takes time – to do the research, to identify the questions you need to answer, to exercise your imagination.

There’s a science to knowing how deeply to dig into a trust, as well as an art. It’s about working proportionate to the value – something you can estimate. Let’s get controversial! Suppose you got lucky with a cold trust and they gave £20k. How much time should you spend on them as compared with, say, a cold trust that you think would give £10k if they gave?

Let’s say your retention rate for first time givers is 40%, then the value of the opportunity, assuming they’d likely give at the same level again, might be:

40% x £20k = £8k

Let’s also say the likelihood of a cold trust giving is 10% and you’ve looking at a cold trust that, at first glance, is an average-looking prospect. The value of the opportunity might then be:

10% x £10k = £1k

…So, the first opportunity is worth eight time the second one, based just on this year’s budget. Is it worth spending eight times as much time on the one? Part of that will be on grant management/reports, in this example. The techniques you use will have diminishing returns and you may not want to put TOO many eggs in one basket. (The maths swings back towards the cold trust slightly when you look at things over a number of years.) 

However, it should be clear that you can justify a lot more time on the first trust if necessary. That’s harder to achieve in writing, say, but for something like research or engagement, it’s a matter of choosing to try different things.

Some trust fundraisers would like to do a minimum of research here. They’d say “I know what this trust wants – more of the same.” That may be true. However, cutting corners may not be effective for you. What if they are one of the minority in your portfolio that you could realistically upgrade if you took the right approach, or develop a contact with? What if they’d actually want a change of project?

I used to be an exceptional Lottery fundraiser, with a 75% success rate on my projects. I could write very well and engaged people well. However, my “super power” was that I’d done the maths. I realised that there were prizes for hard work, but also how much the Lottery was worth within my portfolio. When you’re good at the applications, that becomes a lot, as you’ve added a nought on the end of the size of application. So, I’d be very concerned if I hadn’t spent at least a day or two simply researching this funder that I already knew extremely well, to identify the nuances in how they worked. (This approach doesn’t work as well now that more is delegated to the decision of the individual grants officer, which effectively introduces a bit more randomness into the process, from the applicant’s standpoint.)

As a manager, if you think your hierarchy might support you to grow the team, I’d consider more intensive work on key opportunities. Trust fundraising already has an excellent Return on Investment. Why are you trying to improve your RoI by increasing efficiency, when actually, you could be building your donor base by working better with the trusts you could realistically have supporting you? Suppose you’re working efficiently enough with all your trusts – and achieving good recruitment and retention rates – but you aren’t reaching all the trusts. That’s an argument for another post to grow income, rather than an argument for greater efficiency. Then you’re really empowering your charity and your service users.