Photos: Sarah Pflug and (insert) Shopify Partners, on Burst
The material on this page is for beginners. if you have three or more years’ experience, you might find useful the strategy-type pages in the Trusts Team menu associated with this page: https://goodgrantfundraising.org.uk/time-plans/.
This is a page to look at once you’ve been a trust fundraiser for at least a few months. (Before then, you probably have enough challenges to consider.)
The value of opportunities varies considerably. Suppose your job involves approaching trusts for gifts of up to £10k. Let’s suppose a trust’s chance of giving again is 60% and they’d give £10k. With another, cold, trust their chance of giving is, ¼ of that and a gift might only give £1k. When you do the maths, multiplying together the size of any grant and the chance of getting it, the first opportunity is 40 times more valuable to you than the second one.
That has significant consequences for you:
Over time, you’ll need to develop the ability to do things in a quick, surface way – skimming the odd grants list, making a few changes to a standard proposal, writing more general updates that don’t have so many figures that are time consuming to get.
You’ll need to learn to spot where you might get bogged down on less important stuff and find ways to move on: leaving trusts out of approach lists, refusing to do things for people, being satisfied with second or third best and so on.
You’ll need to learn to “sprint”. Once you know your job a bit, it’s worth taking a new trust some Friday afternoons, say and doing everything on that trust – researching them, writing a proposal from scratch and sending it out – in just that 3½–4 hour block of time.
You’ll also need to develop the skill of doing things carefully and thoroughly when it matters.
A lot of people feel much more comfortable either sprinting or going slowly and carefully. Once you’re secure in your work, you need to learn to do both as required.
You need to plan regularly and to include the value of the opportunity in your planning. That is so that you don’t lose a sense of perspective and work either waste time or work in too slapdash a way.