Administrative systems

Photos: Eberhard Grossgasteiger and Daniel Fazio, on Unsplash

The importance of great systems

It’s extremely hard to be a successful trust fundraiser without being organised and having good systems in place. I’m not naturally particularly organised and at times have felt tempted to let go of the organisation to help me keep up with what can seem like the relentless pace of the job. However, this is a terrible idea and when I haven’t been organised, I’ve really regretted it:

• There are so many trusts and projects, if you don’t maintain good systems, you cannot be in control. This is very unpleasant, you feel disempowered and you (quite legitimately) worry about losing money

• There are lots of fixed deadlines and if you miss them, you can lose money for your charity

• You need to be able to balance short- and long-term demands on your time. If you don’t keep on top of the short term ones it is stressful and you can miss deadlines. If you don;t keep on top of the long term ones, you can grind to halt

• Trusts don’t see someone with poor admin. They see a charity that hasn’t provided its report. Over the years from chatting to or working at trusts, I’ve picked up that they can interpret this as meaning you doesn’t care as much, or it might mean they need to spend their time chasing you, when they’re already busy

Systems you need

A database

It is vital that you, and your charity, are able to remember all the data about the trust, so that oyu need to store and be able to retrieve all contact with trusts:

• Trusts won’t see you as some random member of staff, they’ll see you as the latest embodiment of your charity. Occasionally when you speak to a trust on the phone, you’ll find that they remember something that your charity did with them years earlier.

• Also, your charity will gradually build a picture of who they are, which will be important in developing the best relations and achieving the charity’s objectives with their money.

• I’d estimate that maybe half of the significant difficulties I’ve had around relationships with trusts, over my more than 25 years, have come from poor handover. Part of that is usually down to information either not being in the database (though occasionally it’s been because it was extremely difficult to access)

Getting more specific, what should be stored?

• All gifts: when, how much, to what, including the income codes that Finance have allocated to it. This is vital for reporting, accounting for the money, audit trails and research

• All conversations: they can contain the detail of the relationship and/or a significantly better understanding of the trust

• Contacts: you need to know who you’re approaching and one day, you may need that extra phone number or email address

• Records of applications: successes and failures, with reasons

Why do systems fail? People don’t prioritise storing things (e.g., they’re trying to save time) and doing so consistently. This means:

• They have to store things as of course, straight after completing the communication. It’s an efficient and accurate approach

• There’s an agreed approach that’s intuitively obvious and clearly transmitted between post-holders, so that when you look back two post-holders, it all still makes sense

• Trying to find a way to make things work that is easy, rather than clunky and time consuming

A calendar of approaches and reports to the trusts (sometimes called a “pipeline”)

You need something with all the diverse dates integrated together, from which you can get an overview and plan your fortnight/month and feed into your income forecast.

This needs to match reasonably accurately to your forecast. People sometimes let the year get away from them because they assume they’ll get through enough work in time, when actually they haven’t properly allowed for the key time constraints, such as how long it will take the trusts to decide.

A spreadsheet of what was sent out

Technically, this is duplicating slightly what’s in the database. However, in practice, unless it’s extremely easy to run reports from the database, with lots of hyperlinks in, it’s very useful to have:

• To monitor how you’re doing against KPIs for sending stuff out

• To easily see success rates, and what’s working

• To be able easily to find variations on applications, bits of text and other stuff that you;ve written

Folders specific to all your trusts, projects, etc

Trust folders

In the folder specific for a trust, it may be worth keeping old working materials, for example in case you need to reuse them or go back through and work out how the budget and/or targets were calculated a year ago, ready for your report. Or to prove that a change to the project was given the go ahead by the Director of Services. I’d also keep copies of all emails and other correspondence.

However, it should be nice and easy for the next trust fundraiser (or you, a year later) to go staight into the folder and see the key documents (proposals, reports, budget).

I personally have a folder within each trust folder for the year’s work. This quietly archives the increasingly irrelevant old work and keeps the new work to hand.

Other

It’s not advisable to keep lots of information about projects, income budgets, etc, in your personal folders. When you eventually leave, they could be useful to your successor.

A calendar of other key tasks

You need to make sure that everything else is ready, or you will find your approaches/reports start overrunning significantly. So for example

• If the success of your year depends on a new project, you need to know when you need it to be ready and to have planned in the activity to try and ensure that happens. You can’t always deliver on this (other departments may be hard to get to do what you need). However, with a good plan you can give it your best shot and re-evaluate and find a plan B in time to salvage as much as possible, if Plan A doesn’t work.

• If you’re hoping to use your trustees to develop some connections, you’ll need to have the lists of trusts ready by a certain date, which might means having completed certain research by then

Come the end of the year/the new year, there may be a lot that needs updating (e.g., budgets and targets). It helps to have that planned in with the relevant staff, so it doesn’t drag months later than it needs to.

Folders with materials you’ll reuse

The most efficient trust fundraisers seem to have quite a bit to hand, meaning they aren’t having to redo things or spend a lot of time going back though old emails and proposals looking for things.

This includes items such as:

• Template proposals

• Template reports

• 100/200/300-word standard answers that you can tweak to fit the context

• Stuff you have to append to applications, such as Annual Accounts, Management Accounts, policies

• Details you reuse in applications/forms: charity number, bank account details, etc

• Case studies

• Banks of quotes

• Photos you more commonly use

• Contact details for referees (these should be password protected for GDPR)

• A bank of the different passwords you use for different websites. (This needs to be stored very securely)

Income budgets/reforecasts

How much you’ll raise will change as the year goes on and so will the dates that oyu expect payments to come in. As such, you need to keep on top of this.

Budgets and targets for the different services you fundraise for

It’s a big help to have something that brings everything together in one or two places, and using which it’s easy to cut up the budgets and targets according to the needs of different trusts. So for example if you’re only fundraising for one out of six centres where you work, or for the people in the South of your area of benefit rather than the whole thing, it may help you overall if you can quickly pull off the figures, rather than having to work them out each time.