Photos: Adam Winger and (insert) William Iven, on Unsplash
The material on this page is for beginners. If you are a trust fundraiser with three or more years’ experience, you may find the menu of webpages associated with the following page more useful: https://goodgrantfundraising.org.uk/sources-of-information/.
By now, it may be painfully obvious that there’s more that you could do than you’d ever be able to fit in. However, a skill that you will gradually learn is to work more quickly and superficially, or more carefully and in depth, depending on the scale of the importance of the trust to you. The chances are, some opportunities are worth a lot more to you than others.
So, it’s a bad idea to research trusts alphabetically.
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If you are researching a list of cold trusts, it’s usually a good idea to order them by size and work your way down. You have to be careful not to get bogged down on big, irrelevant trusts. (They tend to have a lot to say.) However, if you find yourself spending a bit of time trying to work out how a big one can be made to fit, then as long as you aren’t stretching things (trusts have far too many applications and normally don’t feel the need to stretch their boundaries) it can still be a good use of time as compared with, say, a cold trust that would only give you a couple of £100.
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If you are researching warm trusts, key considerations are:
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Timings. As trusts only meet so often, it’s normally a bad idea to send and application in late.
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Size of grant
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Chance of giving to you. If you need a rule of thumb, you might guess that someone who’s given once might have a 40% chance of giving again, someone who’s given twice in row 60%, three times 80%.
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As you get into the job, or into fundraising for a specific project, you should develop a general sense of how many trusts you need to be approaching. If you assume you’re spending at least 20% of your time on research, you can start to get a sense of how long you can spare on average. Then you need to factor that up or down depending on the importance of the trust to you: can you get by with just skimming the materials, or are they important enough to spend a lot longer on?
When you start the job, you will be slower and make mistakes with things like this. That’s perfectly normal. Over time, you start to get a feel for it. Judgement calls like whether to do borderline trusts at all, or how long to spend on things, are hard for beginners. However, if you approach it intelligently, try and learn and ask experienced people, they do gradually get easier.