Sources of information

Photos: Tenille K Campbell and (insert) Jose Silva, Burst

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

Identifying and evaluating sources of information are just the kind of thing the trust discussion groups do really well. A lot of this page is a digest of the many excellent comments left by experienced trust fundraisers. If this helps you orientate a bit, I strongly recommend you go to those sources to get a greater understanding.

Choosing your “workhorse” directory

Funds Online is the industry standard web site. They’ve always had more staff. If you haven’t used it, it’s limitations are:

• It’s based on identifying key bits from the accounts and any web site of the funder. It doesn’t necessarily update as soon as changes happen and because it’s a regurgitation of what’s there, there’s no analysis.
• There’s no newsletter to tell you about new schemes or closing opportunities. (It’s probably well worth subscribing to one.)
• There’s a small, supposedly representative, selection of grants, but it’s far too small to do more than give you the vaguest of vague ideas.

I personally use Funds Online for three things:

• As a way to see the vast majority of trusts, ranked by size, so that I’m spending more of my research time focused on where the most money is
• As a quick way into a funder – there’s a summary, they give you a charity number and you’ve orientated yourself a bit before you read the full details. The information sticks better / digests better
• The search engine isn’t up to much, but it’s something

Possible alternatives are things like Funding Central and the Idox database. These sometimes have more up to date information, but the number of trusts is much smaller. I’d personally only rely on these as my main database if my charity won’t cough up for Funds Online. We’ve signed up to free databases mainly to get newsletters of trusts.

If you need more trusts and your charity won’t pay from Funds Online, a good thing to try is to spend some days at a public library. Both the Directory of Social Change Guides to the Major Trusts and CAF’s Directory of Grant Making Trusts are held in quite a few reference sections. If you go on your Local Authority’s website, you can search the library catalogue to find it. Both books should be there. (The new edition of both might not always be accessible this way – but as you’ll end up in the trust’s web site and accounts anyway, this isn’t as bad as it sounds if you use your common sense.)

Researching the trustees

In Grants Fundraising, the Directory of Social Change’s main book on trust fundraising, Neela Jane Stansfield recommends rearching the Trustees online, to see what you can learn about their philanthropy. However, she cautions not to get sucked into wasting a lot of time on this.

It’s definitely worth a go if you never have, just to see the kinds of results you get.

I can see the effectiveness of this if they have a Twitter feed where they are expressing a lot of opinions, for example. 

Similarly, if the charity has a more major donor-type approach. (In the next 12 months, I’m trying to get two key trust donors with strong personal contacts to each give £1/2m to the cause, really understanding the individuals, who I can meet, would be a real help.) 

A quick check on LinkedIn, at least, might give you a bit more of a picture of who the people at the trust are – where they haven’t deleted their LinkedIn profiles.

On the other hand, I’ve personally never felt that time spent Googling generally for things like interviews or reports where they discuss their philanthropy have produced much, compared with other uses of the time. When I’ve given this task to volunteers, they’ve tended to give up, which probably says something.

If you go down this route, you 100% need to include it separately in your GDPR considerations. That is because the standards for individuals are different from those for trusts and you’re straying towards looking at someone as an individual, not the activity of a trust, now. The new Researchers in Fundraising handbook has chapters on the ethics/data side of researching individuals.

Meet the funder events

These are dotted around the UK and have occasionally proved useful to me: 

• They’re a good way to better understand the local Community Foundation and big funders like Children in Need, the Heritage Lottery fund or the National Lottery Community Fund, who attend a lot of the events. They can do revealing presentations and/or be busy trying to get over to you the things that applicants don’t understand about their grants schemes.
• You can find old videos online of webinars that funders have run (e.g., on the Get Grants website).
• Some very local but nationally distributed schemes also tend to attend the events, such as the funding administered by Groundwork
• Occasionally there’s a key trust at a particular event.
• It’s a good chance to eyeball some funders and to go round chatting them up as personal development, even if none of them turn out to be a big lead. If you’re not THAT experienced (or you need a refresher) it’s useful to see what trusts in the more accessible end of the market are like and to see a bit more what it’s like talking to them.

It seems a hit-and-miss thing to do. Sometimes the event has been invaluable with a funder. At other times I’ve come away having learnt nothing and wondering why I hadn’t spent the time on the phone. Most of the people working for me have been a bit more introverted, but – I tend to get people out there at least the once. They are usually relatively positive about the visit, but they don’t push for another. I’d say, definitely try them, but you also need to be hard headed when deciding is it a good use of your time.

How do you find the events? They are usually called “Meet the funders”, “Funding fair”, “Funder fair”, “Funding fayre”, “Funder fayre”. They’re usually announced a bit over a month beforehand, so if I have a research volunteer I ask them to check regularly. There are also a few key ones at the same time each year – for example, currently there’s: a big one in West Yorkshire in the Autumn; a good one run for Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea and Hammersmith & Fulham, in about July; a decent one in Brighton in the Summer.

YouTube/Vimeo

It’s worth searching for the trusts that are more likely to be “putting themselves out there” on the main video platforms. It’s not unusual for the staff who turn up to want to talk about the important things that aren’t written in their reports/web site (as well as endlessly saying, “Please read the guidance notes properly”…)

Podcasts

The Barclays Philanthropy podcast and What Donors Want podcasts occasionally have UK trusts on them.

What about less visible trusts? 

Various people produce lists of trusts that aren’t in the main guides. Invisible Grantmakers seems to be the main publication, in that it’s being actively worked on. Over the years I’ve read a lot of comments in the Trusts Special Interest Group emails about IG and have tried it myself. It’s never going to replace your main database, but should provide enough marginal added value to more than pay for itself. It’s particularly good on funding for NGOs working overseas, which seems to be less well researched by Funds Online, for some reason.

New Trusts publications

If you’ve got a massive trust fundraising programme like the big national children’s charities, say, then this is well worth considering. (another charity I was at for a short time was also using them). At two other national charities I’ve worked, they’ve been treated as of marginal use. I’ve been at one regional disability charity where they got very lucky, with a big six figure grant from a new trust, which led them to commit to the process. (Not sure they had other notable successes.) 

Yes, they do work to secure income if you’re a national but I suspect that usually you’d probably be actively trying to grow income, with a corresponding level of staffing, to justify it. Otherwise, what seems to happen is they get pushed out when people are too busy doing other trusts and not gone back to.

When discussing them with the responsible fundraisers, I wondered if it was worth doing some kind of policy briefing, which could also be treated as a request for funds, rather than simply approaching new trusts straight for a grant for a project. A common rejection reason from newly formed trusts is: we are still working out our policy, so we aren’t considering applications. Logically therefore, why not send them a document that helps them to do that, in the hope it’s considered by the trustees? If you started by making some arguments for your area of work to be included AS A MATTER OF POLICY and then included one or two half page or one page examples of what might be funded, then you might be seen as relevant to anyone and still get considered by those trusts that ARE taking applications? I’ve been told in each case: “That’s very interesting” and then they haven’t done it. I’ll leave you to judge what to make of that, for yourself.

There are four ways to get lists of trusts:

• Both the Factary and a company called New Charities produce researched lists of trusts.
• The Directory of Social Change also produces an annual guide to new trusts. This is a much cheaper way to get the information, but it’s significantly older. There isn’t a way to list these trusts via the DSC web site (Funds Online) though they should be on it. However, the information is older than on the Factary and New Charities lists, who’ll have stolen a march on you.
• You can also do the work the hard way (which I saw at one national armed services charity). On the Charity Commission register, an option under the Advanced Search is to choose the date of registration of the charity and choose the “makes grants to organisations” option. You’ll have to process the raw data by eliminating organisations that aren’t really grant making trusts and make all the exploratory calls that the Factary and New Trusts do. So, it’s very inefficient. However, it IS cheap.

Publications of other charities in your field

If I feel I’m short of funders – I’m trying to identify trusts or to grow the portfolio of funders we’re trying to work, or I have a specific project to fund – this can be a useful technique to add names. I’ve found big overseas funders this way and by getting a research volunteer to do it for an extended period, I turned up enough work at one charity to justify an additional post (focussed largely on trusts giving grants up to £10k).

Charities like to thank their trust donors and that results in two main sources of lists of funders:

• Their Annual Report, published on the Charity Commission web site about the same time it usually goes on their own website. The list is usually towards the end of the CEO’s report on the charity (the section in front of the accounts figures). Alternatively it might be in a note on restricted income within the accounts and in smaller charities donors are sometimes listed directly in the Income of the charity.
• If you can’t find a list this way, it might be on the back page of an Annual Review or Impact Report on their website

If it’s useful to make the time to keep going, you could look for a page on the web site that’s been made up for Charitable Trusts. You can sometimes find trusts thanked in newsletters on the charity’s web site (though Googling ‘thank site:Bloggscharity.org.uk’ can produce so much junk, you’re looking for a needle in a haystack).

Other (UK)

Companies House has records for maybe half the trusts I spend my time on. I find it useful really for two things:

1. For Scotland, whereas you can only see one years’ worth of accounts on OSCR (and it has taken the extreme position that people’s names mentioned are all personal data to be redacted) in the Companies Register you can see everything, Going right back to the birth of the trust.
2. Once every few months it’s useful to look at more than five years’ accounts (usually to get the deep history or I vaguely recall there might be grants lists after the trust has stopped including these).

It seems obligatory, at this stage, to mention looking for lists in your local library and local CVS. This hasn’t worked for me, but unless it’s an urban myth it must have worked for someone, or trainers/authors wouldn’t occasionally mention it. 

I have spoken to local funding advisors at the Local Authority or CVS, who’ve been very knowledgeable about trusts based in their area.

Fundraising Magazine has a one page Meet the Funder article in each edition, so if you have an online subscription you have access to a bit of a library. They seem to be about awareness raising rather than informing, as a result a lot of them couldn’t have added less to the easily available information if that had been the main aim in writing. Occasionally, though there’s actual substance.

If you’re a museums fundraiser, get on your bike and cycle round the local city. Visit all the museums and photograph the plaques acknowledging donors.

There’s perhaps a little to be gained from looking at pet projects that your target trust tweets about.

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

Overseas sources

The following lists the web sites / directories I’m aware of for foundations based outside England & Wales. It’s currently really for people in the UK trying to find funders from UK charities. 

Personally, I’d say that, unless you’re actually based in the country in question or you work in a very international field of work, most charities will find looking at overseas directories, registers, etc, useful just to better understand and to identify contact details for trusts that are already of interest (e.g., you’d got a contact or they’ve given a good size grant to a similar charity). There are fields of work like research or overseas development where I can absolutely see the point, but for the rest of us: why would a Foundation be interested in you, rather than the host of charities from their own country with great applications?

I just put this to the test: I’m at a hospital, which is a slightly intrenational field of work. So, I put the leading UK hospital charities into the grants keyword search of CitizenAudit (which searches grants lists in the accounts and for for which I took out a subscription). There were very few foundations of interest in the States. Even world leaders in international fields, like Oxford University, Oxfam and the Tate, seemed to be getting figures in the order of £1/2m a year, which which not to be sniffed at isn’t a gamechanger in their terms. (I’m not a good enough American fundraiser to know if this is a weakness in CitizenAudit, rather than a lack of funding – but it reflects the small size of the US directories that the DSC, Chapel and York and others have produced in the past.)

Anyway, here’s the list of sources:

 

Scotland

• OSCR is worth keeping up with – it only lists one year’s accounts. So, if there are trusts of interest it makes sense to save them in your folders so you can build a better picture over time.
• If the trust is also a limited company, you can see all the past accounts (and the names of the trustees) at Companies House.
• Both the Directory of Social Change and the SCVO have produced directories in the past, which you’d have to buy second hand online. There’s also an old directory produced by ResearchPlus that you can still buy.
• SCVO has an online site called Funding Scotland.
• However, Scotland has much worse directories than England and Wales. If you have the time, it’s well worth using the advanced search function on OSCR and other more advanced techniques such as looking at annual reviews of people in your field.

Northern Ireland

There’s a Northern Ireland Charity Commission which maintains a list that’s a lot like the England and Wales list, though with 3 years’ accounts, rather than five.

States of Jersey and Guernsey

There’s an easily found Registers of Charities, but as of 05/08/21, no accounts. The Guernsey one didn’t even have contact details.

USA

• There always seems to be some website in the States where you can see past sets of accounts, also referred to in US fundraising jargon as 990s. (There is always a grants list, with narrative descriptions of the grants.) At the moment, that’s ProPublica, as well as the Economic Research Institute. If you know the state where the foundation is registered, the 990s may also be available from a registry of the state itself.
• If you go the CitizenAudit web site, you can keyword search past sets of accounts – i.e., if you put the name of another organisation in your field in inverted commas, you can search whether any US foundations have made a grant. I foyu;re a big US fundraiser, you may want to consider whether to pay Candid for the same service.
• In the past, both Chappel and Yorke and the DSC have produced directories of US Foundations giving in the UK.

Switzerland

• You could have a go at Fundraiso. However, registration in the Register of Commerce is not mandatory for associations having a non-profit purpose. So, there’s no guarantee it will pick up a particular Foundation you want. (Trusts can of course hide in many countries if they want – in the UK, you’d just become a fund at CAF.)
• The Register of Commerce is here: www.zefix.ch

Philea (European foundations membership organisation)

• Quite a few of the largest European Foundations are members of the Philea (successor body to the European Foundation Centre). You can find details of each member on the Philea site.

Overviews of different sectors of grant-making

There might be a little bit to be gained by reading the (much more detailed) evaluations of some areas that exist abroad than in the UK, which you can access through the site of Candida (what was the US Foundation Centre) and the European Foundation Centre (both their own publications and in their virtual library.) There’s a moderately interesting report on capital funding on the Clothworkers Foundation website. If you fundraise from the States, Inside Philanthropy has several quite good reports on different areas.

There are very old guides to different areas of funding, published mainly by the Directory of Social Change and now available really only second hand on Amazon. For example on: sports; overseas development; culture; giving by South Asians; and regional funding guides. If that’s you, the information will be hugely outdated but you might spot the odd new name.

“How to fund the area” guides by New Philanthropy Capital

NPC went through a spate of writing reports on what good work and value for money was in different areas of work, all still available on their website. They’re very dated, but could give a little insight into best practice in the field.

If I worked on overseas work, especially poverty, I’d also look at the work of J-PAl (The Abul Latif Jameel Poverty Action lab) which has done randomised controlled trials on hundreds and hundreds of charities to determine the most effective means of addressing a wide range of issues. 

Resources

The Best Practice Guide and Handbook for Prospect Research from the Chartered Institute of Fundraising. This is major donor research, really and is being published a chapter at a time, online.

101 Ways to Grow Your Prospect List: Alicia Grainger has a resource that looks to mention a lot of resources. You need to sign up to her newsletter at the same time – and it sometimes has good ideas.