Being the first trust fundraiser at a charity

Photos: Pixabay and (insert) Fauxels on Pexels

This area of the site was written for very experienced trust fundraisers.

The following are some thoughts about starting out in a job where there was either previously no trust fundraising or it was at a very low level.

They supplement the page of notes on starting any new trust fundraising job: if you view that, you’ll see that those points will usually still apply. There’s just a whole extra level of complexity to starting something from scratch.

Check you’re ready for this

I set up my first brand new trust fundraising function after about five years in the field – and that felt right. Setting up a new function requires more from you. You’ll need to stand and fall purely on your own decisions, to agree more things, to be the person everyone goes to, to set a lot up and put a lot right. That’s all before you actually get onto the main business of actually raising money.

You’ll also have to be patient with things being wrong. You need to be good at educating, persuading and working hard to set things up, and keen to do so. You need to have a higher tolerance for uncertainty and a more problem solving, entrepreneurial spirit than when you’re working as part of a bigger team and/or in a charity where trust fundraising is established. 

It’s very rewarding, but more demanding and you’re operating without some of the normal safety nets.

Check the charity really knows what it’s doing, creating the role

The work begins before you get the job. You need to know if you’re being sold a pup! You need to do a fundraising feasibility study, in miniature, before you work for the charity. Either that, or you need to know that an expert has already done that.

How do they know the work is fundable from trusts? At one role, after interviewing for and being offered the role, I sat in their office for an afternoon with a directory and even rang some trusts, checking whether the money really was there. There are good local charities whose work is never going to be funded by that many trusts, for example, just because their concerns are too parochial for substantial numbers of trusts to be interested.

In another case, the charity I was to work for was at a scale that it didn’t have proper processes in place for lots of things, never mind trust fundraising.

Your targets may not have been properly calculated and if you can spot this early, it’s easier to negotiate or withdraw before you leave your existing job. It’s not unusual for targets to be calculated on the basis of what’s needed, or sometimes on the basis of what sounds like a suitable return on investment on the post. That doesn’t mean either (a) the money’s there, or (b) it would come in by the date when the charity is looking for results. 

An example as regards the timing: I mentored someone who set up a fundraising function at a Jewish welfare charity. It took her ages to raise very much. She rang another Jewish welfare charity in another city and it transpired that they’d had exactly the same experience. They were now well funded, but it had taken years to build income. (That hasn’t always been my experience – I set up the fundraising function for a Tibetan welfare charity and it raised the most in its very first year. I expect the income would have built back up in time, but I’d left and they lost interest in that fundraising technique.)

All this said, I went into one charity as its first trust fundraiser and everything was fine, because there had been enough trust fundraising done, in bits, already and the staff had prior experience. So, things may be absolutely okay.

Focus on building strong relationships with the hierarchy

This starts at recruitment stage, too, but may well be an ongoing theme. The chances are that, in a smaller charity, the CEO and the Trustees will take the decisions. If it’s bigger, it might be the Head of Fundraising making the running. 

These people may well not understand what you’re doing but will have to form judgements about you and your post. Being realistic, you’re probably in for a bumpy ride and they’ll have to guess at whether you know what you’re doing when the bids aren’t going out. They also may not be expecting the demands you’ll make of them. They may not realize what your role actually is, so the Key Performance Indicators for it will probably be wrong. The timescales for your work may well be unrealistic.

So, you need to work hard on building the relationships: being very honest, explaining things, educating everyone, whilst impressing with your knowledge so that you develop trust.

A lot will need to be adapted, probably, to significantly expand trust fundraising. So, you also need to work out how to make that happen internally.

Prioritise your key tasks

It won’t be immediately obvious what works for you and what doesn’t. So, when you start the role you’d be best doing an initial survey of where things are, to see what needs real work. You might have an initial look at:

• Whether you’ll have work to persuade people to change your targets and key performance indicators
• What are seen as suitable fundraising opportunities. Are they?
• How professional the organisation is. (For example, at one charity I actually had to do a lot of educating on basic management systems.)
• Are the projects themselves actually ready for fundraising? Even if it’s good, well-developed work, the timescales may be wrong for fundraising.
• Whether it’s going to be easy to excavate records of past trust fundraising
• Whether the organisation itself is ready. The NCVO has a good page called “Deciding to apply for a grant” that asks basic questions like: is there a bank account with two signatories? Is it a registered charity yet?
• Monitoring systems
• Internal commitments within Services and Finance to provide you the information you need
• You’ll have to work harder in identifying who’ll work with you, because there won’t be a history of support/non-compliance. You’ll have to start persuading some people.
• How much time are you going to have to put into educating people?

These are all new time commitments, on top of the time needed for actual trust fundraising. So, you need to see what’s coming up.

Pitch your role internally as exploratory

At this stage, you don’t know what realistic targets are or what’s going to hold you back. So: big up your knowledge and past successes, but try to avoid commitments regarding money. If after six months only a limited number of proposals have gone out but you’ve solved various significant problems and things are better placed, you want to be able to pitch that as a significant win.

Quick wins and a sense of progress are even more important

Your charity could decide either that you’re the wrong person to make things work or that, brilliant though you are, it’s all a waste of time because the organisation isn’t suited to having a trust fundraiser. Also, if things ARE difficult, it will be harder to keep morale up around trust fundraising.

If you can get some reasonably quick wins and a sense that important applications are under way, you’ll build more momentum – and your own position will be a bit more comfortable!

Basic systems that are essential

Early on, you’ll need:

• Some kind of database. If this isn’t in place: people do store all the same stuff you’ve kept on Raisers Edge, or some other professional database, on big Excel Spreadsheets. If you remember the fields you used to use and set those up again, then hopefully one day it can all be imported to a proper database. There’s an Excel Form function to make data entry more user friendly. I once wrote a “proper” database in Microsoft Access (a programme new to me): it added nothing and in retrospect was a major waste of time.
• A work plan with the trusts on it
• A folder structure. The following may do you:
  • The trusts [27 sub-folders labelled “#” then “A” to “Z”]
  • Planning
  • Template documents
  • Materials for proposals + reports
    • Photos sub-folder
    • Case studies & quotes sub-folder
  • Services [sub-folder for each service. You could have a sub-sub folders for individual initiatives and regular meeting notes]
  • Literature
    • Service users [things like research reports]
    • Services [Evaluations, toolkits, good practice guides for your area of work]
  • Personal
• Within the first few months you may be asked to set up a forecast sheet to show when the money might come in (and to reforecast as time goes on). Given the state of play, something that gives you the rough dates when money would come in, if successful, plus entered in the relevant cells the “Expectation values” (amount x probability of success):

You might reasonably be asked to do this by project if there’s a reforecast being used. However, if you’ve absolutely starting from scratch, really, it’s anyone’s guess. (Something like this might still give an indication as to when a good time is to evaluate whether the new post is working.)

Ideas about your initial feasibility research

You’ll need to have a general sense of which projects might work. After that, I’ve usually skimmed three groups of trusts, in order of priority:

• Existing and past donors
• Trusts with total income over about £400k on Funds Online, or if I don’t have access to that, Volume 1 of the Guide to the Major Trusts (which you can likely find in a reference library in your county/Borough)
• Funders of the most similar charities in our field – looking at their Annual Reviews/accounts over the last few years to pick up more one-off and occasional funders

I’d also sign up to one or two newsletters, to hopefully pick up the most important one-off grants schemes

I’ve always done this and found that fairly broad early research is useful to properly orientate myself for the coming months. Surveying a lot of ground at speed means your results won’t all be reliable, but it will give you a sense of priorities and some key trusts and dates to work towards.