The Need

Photos: Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels and (insert) Farah on Burst

The material on this site is currently for people with at least three years’ trust fundraising experience.

An issue in people’s lives

Normally, it is the need for something in someone’s life that is the big motivator for people to be generous. Think of the direct mail appeals you have seen: this is the reason they are dominated by a focus on what’s worn in someone’s life that needs addressing. It’s not a lack of a service that’s being described, but an actual problem in someone’s life. This is the emotional “heart” of the Need section of your proposal.

It’s not unusual for you to struggle a bit with your Services colleagues at this point. Sometimes they can be reluctant to speculate about this and prefer to focus on “the need” in the sense that their service is a good thing and wouldn’t it be bad if there wasn’t one? That’s not enough for your funders, though. A few ideas:

• Ask them about the life situations of people before they come to the service

• Ask them what the situation in someone’s life would be if the service wasn’t there

• Go away, research the issues yourself and come back with suggestions. Sometimes if there’s clear evidence, they can be more comfortable

• Put the ball in their court by writing somethignn in the proposal and sending it to them for their comments

When do you need evidence of the need?

Trusts can be quite trusting. If you’ve been doing something for a while, they’ll often accept that you know what you’re dealing with. I assessed for a capital funder where I could read a dozen proposals before coming across one with any more stats or evidence than the number of potential beneficiaries in the project area. That was fine by us. They knew what they were on about – and a lot of the research people put in is so “high level” and remote from the problem that you can wonder why they’re doing it. Most Services staff I’ve worked with are “doers” rather than researchers.

On the other hand, open some of the books on trust fundraising and in the need section they can go on at length about the need for evidence of need. Why the glaring difference?

• Some trusts do require a lot of evidence. They will often indicate that, but they tend to be the big, institutional funders. You could check with them when you’re on the phone.

• More commonly, it’s valuable to have evidence on the points where a trust won’t easily take your work for it. For example:

  • Claims about a new service user group whom you haven’t worked with before

  • There seems to be a bit of a jump in your reasoning – e.g., you say you’re reducing crime and the proposal is about keeping people in education

  • Claiming that there’s nothing else in your area for young people to do

  • Claiming in a research proposal that the issue hasn’t been researched before

  • Claiming that people from a particular minority group won’t use mainstream services because they don’t see them as appropriate. (It’s worth bearing in mind that social attitudes research with older men suggests they’re a lot less likely to believe that BAME groups are excluded by services.)

If you’re areas quite affluent, you probably need to work harder, one way or another, to make more of a case that there’s a real need. Research might be one component.

It’s also important to think whether the trust really will trust you to know there’s a need. If you can legitimately say “We see these people coming to us regularly” and include a guesstimate as to numbers, or if you’ve been doing the work for years, that’s one thing. On the other hand, if it seems more on the edge of what you do, why should they just believe you?

If you think about what’s convincing, numbers are often a good way to persuade people – as long as they’re directly relevant to the situation. Your services colleagues won’t always have numbers, but sometimes they’re happy to say the point is true of all or almost all service users. Alternatively, you may need to weigh the need for evidence against the time costs of getting research done. (As with a number of trust fundraising decisions, all you can do to evaluate this is probably to do what research you can, think/talk it through and take your best guess.)

Make it moving, as well as well argued

You are making a professional case for resources, but you are also trying to move a human being. Some trustees are doing this out of generosity, so it makes sense to move them. Also, when you’re sitting there as an assessor, trying to compare the need for a tail lift for a minibus for older people, as against the need for some computers for a training projects for refugees (a real decision I took) what you’re doing isn’t entirely a rational computation. It’s an intuitive decision based on experience and feelings as well as rationality. So if you can move people, that will help you.

Things like quotes and pictures will help, because they’re very direct and engaging. It can help to illustrate points with a description of a line or two about common situations the service sees. You can also think about how you write: no one will want to feel arm twisted, but I’d say that trusts are very happy to see passion. (The most moving text often seems quite objective, though.)

Trust fundraising has an emotional component running right through it. As such, I’d recommend you work out how to be in the right emotion when you write – e.g., writing the need section from a state of concern, the benefits from a state of enthusiasm, etc. You don’t need to do this, but it’s helpful when you’ve writers block and it means you press the right buttons more reliably.

A strong need section has a quality of being clear and obvious

People may only skim what you’ve written, so the key points should jump out. Also, if you want to move someone, subtle and abstruse arguments won’t do it (even though such arguments may have their place, sometimes). Think about when you were moved by something – it probably needed to be pretty obvious for you to really “get” it in your guts.

So, look at the points you’re making that have the most “punch” and just check that they come across as obvious and common sense. If they don’t, can you rephrase the section so they do?

The need must correspond with the benefits

If you write about a need that doesn’t do so, the proposal will seem disjointed/less powerful. If you aren’t sure how to do this, read the webpage about project, need and benefits corresponding.