Photos: Matthew Henry, on Burst
The material on this page is for beginners. If you have three or more years’ experience, you might find more useful the pages on relationships in the menus associated with the following page: https://goodgrantfundraising.org.uk/genuine-gratitude/.
You need to try and remember that trusts personnel are human beings, deserving of plenty of respect – and if you don’t, you can get rejected just for that. This page lists the things I’ve seen in the surveys of and comment from trusts that aren’t related the logical process of giving they’ve taken against.
There you are, computing exactly what to say to convey, need, impact, risk mitigation, how to achieve effective productivity. Then you send the proposal off and it’s quietly rejected by someone because you spelled their name wrong.
Trust personnel can be human beings, rather than professional placeholders and they can act like it, taking against apparent slights. They can do that more than a typical employee would in their job, because (1) their involvement may express generosity, which is an emotional thing, (2) it’s often a hobby, anyway and (3) they aren’t answerable to anyone and so can get away with what oyu never could in your job.
This is a list of more emotional reasons why trusts have said they’ve rejected applications:
Correspondent’s name spelled wrongly
Trust’s name spelled wrongly
Waffling/untidy application (that they clearly didn’t want to struggle through – one survey, largely of smaller trusts, found 1/5 and 1/4 of trusts giving these two reasons)
Impersonal, mass produced application (something that might also indicate the fundraiser didn’t know what they were doing, as well as that they weren’t very interested in the needs of the trust)
Applicant was “overfriendly” in postal/telephone communications (note: this was true only of 9% of trusts and comes from a very dated survey, times might have moved on)
I’ve not once heard a trust say they’d rejected someone after the barrage of criticism they’ve sometimes endured when they have popped up at “meet the funder” Q&As. The trusts who pop up at these things are usually the most professional and therefore the most likely to be okay with frustrated individuals who want to speak truth to power. However, trusts aren’t local authority grants staff and it wouldn’t surprise me if it happens. (If you want my personal view of the criticisms, I think they’re sometimes justified and it’s perhaps no surprise that most books written by trusts staff have been a manifesto for reform. However, this website is about helping people get grants – so, I write this hoping that the odd angry, frustrated person will have read it and considered the point before laying in.)
Self entitlement on the part of the grant-seeker. If you convey a sense that you think you’re entitled to the money – you don’t thank the trust or you don’t send an update, for example – it’s clear that some trusts get alienated. I can’t prove that leads to rejections, but it wouldn;t surprise me.