Tiggers and Zombies

Photos: Mikhail Nilov on Pexels and (insert) Super Snapper on Unsplash

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

Bill Bruty classifies trusts into those that are active and you could usefully engage (whom he characterises as “Tiggers”, after the character that bounces around between different places), and those that really aren’t (whom he characterises as “undead” – it may looks like there’s life, but really there isn’t). The following mainly repeats material in the “extreme researching” page – it’s on both pages because, logically, it should go here, too.

Zombie trusts

An undead trust is one that is technically functioning, but there’s only a bare minimum going on- meaning its actions are highly repetitive, unreactive and involve the minimum effort. If they’re giving to you – lucky you, they tend to just carry on in the same vein. On the other hand, if they aren’t, there’s not much you can do to change them.

You can set up a trust even though you have no interest in charitable giving. The classic scenario that used to be mentioned is to disinherit your children! However, Bill mentions that, under UK corporate law, transferring some of the shares of your company to a charitable trust can make it harder for the company to be taken over. I also suppose it’s also easy to imagine scenarios where the board of trustees might get bored.

Then, as long as the minimum requirements of the Charity Commission are observed, the trust can grind along for many years without needing to display great signs of proper “life”.

What does an “undead” trust look like? If you saw a grants list, it would show almost entirely repeat gifts each year. If the giving shown in the accounts is at a very steady level, purely from income and the expenditure on staffing is very low, the trust’s more likely to actually be a zombie. You’re not as likely to get much of a response from it. Charitable trusts can be set up with company shares fundamentally as a way to make it harder for the family company to get purchased by a hostile outside agency – so, if the capital is all held in one company, that CAN be a possible sign of a zombie trust. The grant makers can lose their interest in grant making.

Lively trusts (“Tiggers”)

There’s likely to be more life and more potential in the trust if: there’s more staffing, more variation in grants, the grants seem to be taking some account of gains and losses on investments (probably not in a linear way) and/or there’s more income coming into the trusts (probably from the founder).