Photos: Kampus Production and (insert) Vlada Karpovich
The material on this page is for beginners. If you have three or more year’ experience, you may find more useful the material in the menus associated with this page: https://goodgrantfundraising.org.uk/emotional-power-in-trust-fundraising/.
There are four purposes behind a good cover note, whether it’s a letter or email:
As it’s the first thing people look at, it’s a good place to answer the trust’s first question. That is: is this application actually eligible? Sometimes there are staff who do nothing except screen out ineligible applications. Also, people assessing the bid can consider eligibility before they think more deeply about the work. The reason is that you’re always looking for ways to husband your time better and eligibility is one of the easiest ways to reject proposals (along with: this application is incomplete). As such, it’s actually quite irritating to have to read a lot before you can identify whether something is eligible. You may be wasting your time.
A summary for the grants panel. At some trusts, the trustees don’t actually see the full application, just a summary and at others the paper by the grants officer will include a summary. As such, there’s a case for writing your own summary for them: the chances are it will be more crafted – more punchy and impassioned, with more (hopefully compelling) stats and arguments squeezed in – than the grants officer would come up with by themselves. A summary can also helpfully orientate the reader for what’s coming next – which is harder for an outsider to assimilate than it probably seems to you as and “insider” who knows the project and as the author.
Something that grabs the attention of the reader. Assessing is hard work and energy available to get through it all can limited in comparison. When they get down to your proposal, if you can give a sense that “this is an important one, to take seriously”, that may benefit you.
There are occasionally things to mention that aren’t part of the project. For example, “We have discussed this project with John Smith on the Board of Trustees”.
As a summary might be just a couple of hundred words (the equivalent of the two large paragraphs, above), it will need to be pretty compact.
It should be written in a way that makes the project look obviously eligible.
The central points of the need
What the project does
The key, quantified, changes to the lives of the end users
When you need the money by (mainly so they can see that the application isn’t being considered too late)
The cost of the work and the amount you’re requesting from the funder
If you can fit it in:
Something about why you’re a great charity, and especially to do the work
Why it’s a very important project
Key evidence
You probably can’t get everything in, so it’s worth focussing on what you think sells your application best.