How many charitable trusts are there?

Photo: Marcus Aurelius

This webpage is for beginners. If you have at least three years’ experience, use this page instead.

There are different figures for the total number of charitable trusts – it’s complicated by definitions, but they all assume thousands of trusts. Of more importance for beginners, though, is the fact that the money is heavily weighted towards the bigger ones: if the DSC has 8,000 funders in its database giving £8bn in total, 43% of those grants come from the Association of Charitable Foundations’ top 300 family trusts and if you add the handful of big Lottery distributors, you’re well over half way before you’ve got out of the top 4%.

If you work for a big charity it may be worth casting your net widely. Otherwise, some people would say you want to find your 50 best prospects (more if you’re starting from scratch and don’t have lots of work grant managing existing donors). Some people would add in a mailing to try and catch rather more trusts that it’s not time effective to be approaching individually.