Photos: Anete Lusina on Pexels and (insert) Matthew Henry on Burst
The material on this page is for beginners. If you have at least three years’ trust fundraising experience, you may find the pages on writing more useful that are in the menus linked to the following page: https://goodgrantfundraising.org.uk/emotional-power-in-trust-fundraising/.
If your benefits don’t address the need, the proposal can seems a little flat, because the project doesn’t do what is needed. Also, it can raise questions: what about the other issues, do they mean that people’s lives won’t actually change?
On the other hand, if the benefits aren’t the because there’s a need – because the Need section is under-written instead – then the project can seem less important. Peopel give fundamentally because there’s a need and there are all these other projects with compelling needs, but this one doesn’t.
On the other hand, when the need, project and benefits line up neatly, the project feels like a coherent response to the issues, creating benefits that seem important in context. Everything seems relevant within a coherent story of important change.
Hopefully when the project was devised, someone started – or at least, quickly focused on – the need and looked at interventions (identifying the project) that created important benefits. That’s also the order in which the proposal is structured: Need – Project – Benefits.
However, the best way to thing, as you write, is Project – Benefits – Need:
You start with the project, itself. That’s the thing that the funder is paying for and as such, it’s only fair to the funder that you describe it fairly. It’s also what the charity actually wants, so it’s a bit of a fixed item.
Next, work out what the actual benefits of that are. You’ll want to think about what the funder wants and when you describe the benefits of the project, you can focus particularly on those benefits.
You might have short term, immediate benefits that especially clearly follow from the project. For example, in a training project for unemployed people, they have important knowledge and skills.
There are often then long term benefits that follow. With the training project, that woul include a proportion of people getting a job within six months, with consequent life benefits (e.g., more money; the proportion of people in work with good wellbeing is higher)
Now you know the benefits, you can research and write up the needs that those benefits address.
There will be immediate needs that the immediate benefits address. In the training project example, a lack of knowledge and skills, or knowledge and skills being out of date.
There will be needs corresponding to the longer-term benefits, too. In the trainng example, this might be: being unemployed, with consequent life problems (e.g.: poverty; worse wellbeing)
Having got the material, you then need to find an appropriate structure that tells the story in a logical way and bring out the points.
In the above example of employment training, this might be:
Need
Unemployment and its consequent effects
For our target population, a key reason why people are out of work is lack of knowledge and skills. [You probably need some kind of proof that it’s a key barrier to getting work]
The project
Employability project
Benefits
X people will complete the course / pass the course, getting the knowledge and skills they need
As a result, Y people will be in work within six months. Research shows that their income will increase and wellbeing improve, as a result