Prospecting and using peer contacts

Photo: Seb Hamel on Unsplash

This webpage was written for people with at least three years’ trust fundraising experience.

Is it worth it?

It can be huge, but seems generally very hit and miss:

• A colleague at a good size consultancy which actively pushed this hadn’t found it effective at either of the local charities where she was. However, colleagues had been extremely successful which was why it was being promoted.
• I’ve worked at charities where I’ve pushed this a bit and got absolutely nowhere. At the same time, I was at a digital health charity where, apart from a Lottery grant, almost all of the trusts income had come through personal contacts of the CEO.
• I put out a question on three different trust fundraising groups about the difference that introducing a strategy of prospecting internally for prospects had made. I had only two or three responses across all the media (not a good return) but the few responses were enthusiastic, with large increases in income.
• In a well-connected charity where I worked, it was worth up to £1m in trust income in a year.

My experience at my latest charity is that you don’t necessarily know whether your charity is one with the opportunities. To me, it didn’t look like a well-connected organisation when I joined. However, we have secured several grants in the low £1,000s in this way and an ongoing relationship of £40,000 p.a.

Who can connect you to a trust?

US major donor specialist Amy Eisenstein says you are looking for people with:

• Access – meaning that if you email or call them, they will call you back. Note: this is “access”, not “Who’s rich?” or you end up focused on the wrong kind of people
• Belief in the cause
• Capacity

How to find contacts: converting trustees

A colleague worked at a large consultancy where this was standard practice. Their experience was that the most successful approach was to meet potential contacts individually, with lists of names but also being open to ideas that they had, themselves.

At the same time, an expert in this presenting at a Chartered Institute of Fundraising event recommended raising it regularly (a “little and often” strategy). Circulating lists therefore seems to have a place, as well.

It’s unlikely that many people viewing this website will be attending the Boards of Trustees regularly. However, if you are: Amy Eisenstein also had a strategy for getting them on board with fundraising, over the months. Rather than using your 15 minute slot in the Board meeting to go through the Fundraising papers, you: send them the papers and do the minimum amount of answering questions; then, you use most of time to build their involvement in fundraising through doing different exercises, which ratchet up the trustees’ involvement:

• Discussing and changing the language around fundraising – what’s the negative language; what’s the positive language could be used instead, e.g., “inspiring a gift”, “investing in the community”, “sharing”
• Exploring appropriate ways to approach funders. How does the donor feel the next morning? If they feel guilted they’ll not pick up the phone; if they feel great because they’ve been inspired and motivated
• Dream big – what could we do if we raised an extra £1m?
• What would happen if we didn’t raise any money? 
• Invite Board members to tell their story – why did I join? What am I proud of? What does it mean to me? Replaces elevator pitch. Then: mocktail party: tell your story for 2-3 minutes, then swap. Then switch partners. Then debrief: how did it change? What was interesting? 
• What does it mean to build relationships with others? Then: How to ensure the conversation isn’t one-way?
• How can we ask for money? What we currently do? Is there anything else other people have done that we should consider? What ways might you feel comfortable? (e.g., adding a personal note to solicitations. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a sit-down major gift meeting.)
• If you give the trustees a “brag session” in their meetings, it puts a little subtle pressure on those trustees who haven’t done anything.

How to find contacts: using your donors?

I’ve come across a couple of examples of trust personnel who liked to use their influence with other trusts. So, this is something to recognise if you see it. I’ve never tried asking trusts who are  better networked could they advocate for us. 

A good example might be having a good supporter in a local area where some of the trusts know each other. I know a trusts team whose biggest corporate supporter facilitated a number of introductions to their network. One conversation so far has led to a six-figure gift.

You need to get a sense of how your contacts know the person at the trust, their influence with the person and the person’s influence at the trust.

How to use your contacts

Major donor experts I’ve seen have said that the best use of contacts are small numbers of meetings with trusts personnel, or if not meetings then at least discussions on the phone. They thought these are better than larger numbers of notes of support. However, notes of support are better than nothing and a colleague who worked at a consultancy that focused heavily on contacts used a lot of notes, they believed to good effect.

If they’re arranging a meeting, the contact won’t be expected to do all the talking. The CEO / trust fundraiser / Services will do most of the heavy lifting. The trust fundraiser (or maybe the CEO) will probably make the actual request. The contact’s job is more to be there to agree and maybe add something personal.

Senior people are used to having and driving their own agendas. So, you need to have briefed them well beforehand and got to the point that you trust them to follow the party line, rather than saying halfway through the meeting: “I know: why don’t you fund this exciting new project at our charity, that I’ve just thought up?”

Marion Alford, the major donor fundraising guru, says in her book on massive capital appeals (her speciality) that with trusts you need to keep the trust staff onside if you’re speaking to a foundation’s trustee. She recommended speaking to trust staff  about how to use the contact before using it, as a way of keeping them in the loop. This hasn’t worked well for me: on two occasions, the staff warned off approaching the trust (in one case) and the contact (in the other)! On the other hand, I came across a story (that I can verify) of a trust being asked to look at whether a negative assessment would be suitable for an application, seemingly BECAUSE the charity was trying to bypass the normal channels and rely on the backing of a trustee. (The manager of the trusts team was quite protective of his position as the person who made the decisions.)

Marion Alford is also of the view that, whilst trusts would move beyond their unpublished policies for a contact, they wouldn’t stretch to funding ineligible work. I lack her level of experience, but that sounds credible.

Building relationships

Personal contacts increase the possibility you can reach people at the trust on a personal basis – getting them to meet / see the work, for example. The view I read from major donor people is that it’s better to have relationships at different levels, because it helps with problems / if the contact moves on. I can’t comment.

When can you increase the size of a grant from a Trust using contacts?

Increasing the grant size via contacts is a matter of some dispute between the big thinkers in our field. Major donor fundraisers would like to see some trusts as just one vehicle for the major donor. It’s almost a truism for them that in major donor fundraising you gradually build to a big gift and then potentially a big relationship from a major donor, as the donor builds confidence in you and contacts are a key part of doing this.

However, trusts guru Bill Bruty has analysed the giving of 100 trusts over many years. He’s rarely found an example of trust continually building their support over time. He says that the more common situation is that they may give big but then come back to the level they gave at initially.

Resources

As this is kind of major donor fundraising, the resources for that are worth considering. There are plenty of books and courses. (For the former: it’s not really my area, so can only refer you to the reviews. However, the new Researchers in Fundraising book looks great (though very expensive). For the latter: I’ve heard good things about Solid Fundraising and about Bright Spot Fundraising.)