Photo: TheStandingDesk.com on Unsplash

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

A basic process seems to be repeated when grants panels assess applications. I’ve tested this several times as a trainer. I repeated an experiment devised by Luke Fitzherbert, who delivered the introductory trust fundraising training at the DSC for many years in the ‘90s and ‘00s. Each table of trainees is a group of trustees, allocating this quarter’s grants against some basic criteria. They get given synopses of grants (which both he and I think isn’t unusual).

The way people usually behave is as follows:

Elimination of applications

My experience is that people at least often begin by eliminating ineligible applications. I recently sat listening to pitches for money to a group of wealthy individuals and trusts. One of the pitches was an emotionally searing cause (in terms of the content, it wasn’t an arm-twisting pitch). It was maybe too much to really engage people? Group settings are where emotional pitches are supposed to work best. However, it raised less in the evening than the others that were there. I think that the reason was that the work was a poor fit with the interests (as I knew them) of the group. Eligibility is that basic. Something fundraisers don’t always realize: because you have so many good applications, it’s easy to reject the ones that are a slightly borderline fit just as the ones that are clearly outside. It’s the first thing you do.

Then they find other ways to whittle things down – picking holes in some, finding others to be clearly less important, given what the trust is set up to do. As I found myself when assessing, the latter stages can be very hard, as you compare things that are very hard to compare.

There is a lot of invention of additional grants policy, that was not (any might never be) written down. Given exactly the same grants policy and applications, no two groups of assessors will ever make the same allocations. (A good example of this: I was in an assessors training event for a huge funder, that used detailed scoring for its assessments. We had a point to score against four sub-criteria and we went round all the tables of trainees, to see how we scored. One table scored “Yes-Yes-No-Yes” against the four points, whereas another scored “No-No-Yes-No”)

That doesn’t mean there aren’t applications that could commonly be “winners”, “losers” and “ones in-between”

The most important learning points at this stage are probably:

• Don’t spend ages on an application which may not be eligible and be skeptical about spending a lot of time on applications which doesn’t appear to be within the unspoken policy. It’s incredibly tempting as an assessor to eliminate everything that’s arguably outside what you fund, as well as the ones that clearly are outside it.
• Make it very easy for the assessor to see you are within what they do. It’s irritating to spend a lot of time trying to work out whether the application fits – this is supposed to be the easy bit for the assessment for the grants officer!

Sharing out the money between those left

Allocations can vary according to factors such as funding shortfall, need, impact, importance to the trust/the trustees of the area of work, or sometimes just equally between everyone. There are lots of round figures allocated when the grants panels are taking the decisions, just because that can be easier for a grants panel that’s trying to control how the funds are shared out. 

Although it didn’t happen at the trusts where I assessed or “first go at grant making” mock exercises, but: it’s clear from the accounts that at a lot of trusts a policy emerges over time of “We give £5k to causes of this particular kind”.

A concern is fairness. Trustees feel a sense of responsibility and are trying to do the right thing. So, whilst some of the things we do – like being easy to read, giving them great experiences – can sway people, they want to temper that with fairness to the applicant. I remember a Grants Officer at Help the Aged telling me she thought her job was to get behind the presentation in a well presented application and that’s a refrain I’ve heard elsewhere. Conversely, an example widely discussed amongst grant makers is the service that does great work, but that doesn’t know how to “play the game” of grantseeking: how do you recognise them?

Before the meeting, the proposals may have been divided into a “recommended for rejection” / “probably not for you” pile and a “take seriously” / “recommended for a grant” pile. So, if you really need to know which pile you’re in, you could in principle ring up a week or so before the meeting, by when the papers will have gone out. (Depending on who takes the call, that might be putting the staff on the spot a bit more, as they can’t so much hide behind the trustees as responsible.)

There’s a degree of correlation between sophistication of grant making and scoring systems / lots to clearly cover in the assessment on the one hand, and simplicity and gut feeling on the other. A big grant probably has a very detailed report behind it. That said, the National Lottery Community Fund, for example, started with a very rigid scoring system and then moved a long way from that. (It’s useful to know how rigid the assessment system is because the writing style is very different. When writing against a detailed scoring system, you’re trying to tick as many boxes / “hoover up” as many different points as possible, which means writing more densely, whereas with “gut feeling” applications having a very clear, very strong central thrust (which might be the need and impacts) is more central.

Hidden priorities

Dawn Austwick, former CEO of the National Lottery Community Fund, made the interesting observation in an ACF plenary on trust that ‘As funders… some of us… these are personal opinions… perhaps [attached] to ourselves not just the act of funding and of supporting, but the act of analysis, diagnosis, solutions development and strategic action and intervention’.

It’s certainly the case that there is a fair amount of hidden policy, quite a bit of which could have been decided in different ways. It’s almost impossible to avoid: if you have incredibly precise criteria, you will still get more applications than you can fund for good quality work. So, how do you actually choose without unspoken priorities? You could argue it’s also the flip side of keeping a degree of flexibility, which many trusts like to do. In practice, they don’t often use that flexibility capriciously, but to follow well worn patterns of thoughts and behaviour.

Other observations from the Fundraising Everywhere grant-making panels

Fundraising Everywhere staged several grants panels at a conference in late 2020, where panel members were trust fundraisers. The criteria were extremely broad (enabling charities to be the best they could) and grants were small (£1.5k). The following were some interesting observations:

• Panel members often found giving to core costs boring and wanted to see a clear, tangible impact of the grant. (This is despite the fact that, in other settings, the panel members as trust fundraisers might be bemoaning the lack of core funding!)
• A clear connection between the grant and the recipient clearly being able to do something was a positive.
• Conversely, they were often concerned about their grant being a “drop in the ocean”. “This money won’t touch the sides”. It was interesting that the one proposal chosen by all panels genuinely made a significant difference in itself. One idea was to talk about what wouldn’t be possible if the money wasn’t given, if you’re a medium or large charity applying for a smaller grant.
• There was a strong bias against fundraisers: “this has been professionally written” which was seen as a bad thing. That’s interesting, given that the panels were professional grant seekers. This links to the idea that, if there are no mistakes showing, people start looking for that.
• Participants would occasionally pick up on the timeliness of something in terms of current events in the world (an issue reflected in a limited number of big fashions appearing amongst the more connected foundations in Trust and Foundation news: e.g., there’s been a lot more talk about the environment in recent years, BAME issues shot into view at the time of the Black Lives Matter Protests). I’ve also noticed a bit of this in the philanthropists group I attend and occasionally assess for (for example, in the midst of the pandemic there was a lot of talk of how arts groups were struggling and this was picked up by members and later reflected in a funded project).

Randomness – should it lead to thoroughness for grantseekers?

At the same time, there’s a simple element of randomness, inevitably, in any assessment process, because you can only do things so many ways and look at so many factors. 

A very obvious example is scored assessment processes. If you see any list of assessment criteria for scoring against, the items on the list should be sensible, but you could equality replace at least some of them with different items and it would probably be just as effective a list. However, you’ll get assessed against the ones on the list – and over time, the assessors may even come to believe it’s the best list, because people tend to become one with what they do repeatedly.

Some of the same will also apply to more informal approaches to assessment. There are still choices being made. A skilled assessor will look at the material that’s positively presented and the obvious questions, including key risks, given the nature of the project and say “This looks strong” or not. A complete amateur will get concerned that they haven’t covered off a secondary, less important issue.

One question is: how can you learn what the hidden criteria are? If they’re a bit random, I’d personally argue that it’s only fair to you to do what you can to surface them: engaging grants staff in conversations where you come at things from a few angles to see what they’re not saying, getting good detail on funded applications, even ringing successful applicants to get their opinions.

The question is: how do you respond to this, in writing terms? With scored applications, a writing style that is dense with points (yet still very clear and powerful) will maximise your chance of hoovering up the marks. (If you read a tender written by an expert, it will have that quality.) When applications aren’t scored, there’s perhaps more of a balance between trying to guess the point at issue and putting it in on the one hand and being aware that assessors will be tired on the other and possibly impatient about fine detail.

Portfolio grant-making: an occasional glitch for us

One of the reasons why our results are as unpredictable as they are is that trusts can be looking, to some degree, for a balanced “portfolio” of funded work: About £X spent on one field of work, about £Y on another, some kind of factoring in of geography and maybe other considerations such as minorities or size of funded organisation.

The more they’re not just trying to fund the best projects, the more you’re dependent on what else happens to have been submitted when it comes to whether you’ll get funded. The smaller the groups of applications you are in with, the more random things are and the ore it helps to know your competitors, if possible. It ‘s a problem that particularly affects a few of the “best run”, most scrupulous trusts.

One example: Children in Need seems pretty hit-or-miss at local level, because you know they’re only going to fund one emotional support project (or whatever) in your Borough. (You can work out the details from close reading of the grants lists.)

Another: I banged away with Reaching Communities at a volunteer-led project that I hoped was going to introduce much better practice into residential care for older people. (They rejected it because they misunderstood the service users and thought they’d be capable of more leadership during the project.) When we eventually overcame the communication issues, my last assessment told me there was no way they could possibly see of improving the project, but they wouldn’t fund it anyway, because six months earlier they’d just funded another [demonstrably much inferior] project in older people’s residential care in the same Borough.

Peaks in grant making

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 and whether/how it’s possible to secure massive grants because the trust suddenly comes into money. More of the practicalities are covered in the Research pages. However, Some key points regarding allocation of grants are:

• 91% of grantmaking doesn’t fluctuate very much by year
• 66% of donors have significantly increased their giving at some point in the dataset – on average, 4.5 times over 14 years.
• In 85% of cases, this led to a significant increase in giving and it’s usually the only time that grantmaking increased. In only a small fraction of cases (better that you read the report to make your own guess as to exactly how many) was the money given out in the same year. This suggests that the allocation of funding often followed the gift.
• The extra cash was almost always given to only a few recipients. 
• Bill suspects the grant making is normally determined by individual, rather than institutional, decision making
• The beneficiaries of these one-off major grants: 
  • Appeared “out of the blue” – seemingly either new recipients or recipients from several year ago. They were then rarely funded again within the four year time frame that Fundraising Training were able to check.
  • Some grants were to new organisations within the existing sectoral interests of the Foundation. Others were to completely new sectors!
  • Were not normally fundraising charities – Bill cites names such as Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute, Coventry City of Culture and Fareshare (which apparently wasn’t particularly a fundraising charity at the time). Bill’s slightly moderated his view that we all miss out at this stage. He says that the biggest problem seems that we aren’t seen as “safe” or “appropriate” recipients of a massive grant, leaving a possible window of opportunity.
• There are occasionally intermittent recipients of major grants when extra moneys are available. These appeared to me to be more the kind of fundraising names you might anticipate (a Quaker centre, a very prestigious library, a major public art project).