Benefits to the service user

Photos: Cottonbro on Pexels and (insert) Sarah Pflug on Burst

This webpage is for trust fundraisers with three or more years’ experience. Beginners should start with this page instead.

Don’t over promise(?)

I’ve seen fundraisers who include the highest reasonable targets in their proposals, presumably because that makes them more attractive. I’m usually much more interested, personally, in the likelihood of delivery. So for example, at my present charity we usually have external targets for applications for established services that are 90% of the internal ones and when Services introduce new ones or tell us they have ways to up the numbers, we’re pretty skeptical about going with their figures.

There are lots of reasons targets can be set too high: sheer over-optimism; as a way of stretching people; to give direction (“this is higher volume, lower quality/impact, work”).

The reason we usually focus on risks to delivery, not impressive numbers, is: 

• Donor retention usually takes priority in this situation. If you analyse where the money has come from in previous years, it’s largely from past funders. So, donor retention is key.
• Building on the above point… Even with new funders, trusts guru Bill Bruty’s analyses suggested to him that the key point in a relationship with a trust is whether to give a second time. (He was talking about giving within five years, I think.) I suspect that sometimes trusts just like giving to new causes. (I had a call with a trust who was angry that I thought they’d “re-fund” us, because they’d funded both of the predecessor charities that our merged charity was formed from. Over a decade earlier!) However, my gut feeling is that poor performance in reports could turn trusts off long-term. I can’t prove it, but my thinking is: trusts don’t know you from a hole in the ground, they just know what you’ve sent them in writing, plus maybe a little bit more from the web site and report. If when you report back on your first grant, you’re trying to explain away underperformance, you don’t look trustworthy.

Solid and safe is certainly a better impression for most trusts than exceptional but risky. In nearly 30 years, I’ve only heard two major funders say they were happy to fund genuinely risky work, that stood a reasonable chance of failure. One was Bridget O-Brien Twohigg, former Director of the J Paul Getty Foundation, the other Dragons Den investor and philanthropist Nick Jenkins. Both did so in the context of saying how risk averse the people around them seemed to be.

This is especially true for new services – and especially innovative ones, which usually have unanticipated problems. 

You might achieve your targets for individuals worked with or getting a qualification, but will that really produce the long-term results? Will 80% of participants in a six month employability project really be in work three years later? Will a befriending volunteer really mean that someone who is isolated and suffering from depression is no longer lonely?

Value for the trust’s money

Experienced consultant Simon George describes outcomes (meaning changes to the beneficiaries’ lives – as opposed to “bums on seats” at the service) as “the holy grail of funding bids” in his little book Raising Funds from Grant Makers. A constant theme from trusts is the impact of their grant – meaning how will their money change lives?

It should go without saying therefore, but: if you just list the measures, rather than the differences made, you’re spoiling your chances. (I mention this perhaps because I literally just assessed a very good project that spoiled its chances with me in this way. People occasionally get confused – hopefully not the experienced people on this site?)

The outcomes should offer value for money in the sense of number of lives changed and depth of change. (If I’m able to do some interviews with funders to add into this site, what value for money looks like will be one topic I’d like to cover.) Very high intensity projects can struggle to compete: at a trust I worked, we had zero interest in key workers for people with profound and multiple disabilities, for example, because the ratio of staff to service user was incredibly low.

As with any area of trust fundraising, consistency in having thought about the material is important. The ACF guide for assessors (which actual trusts can of course ignore) suggests the following questions to cover and is a basic checklist:

Results

• What changes do you [the applicant] hope to achieve?
• How will you monitor your progress and evaluate the results?
• What plans do you have to share what you learn from this work? [Something just adding value, usually]

 You should try and get outcomes that are SMART:

Specific

Measurable

Achievable by the work described

Relevant 

When you generally see the SMART acronym, the R. is for “realistic”. However, “relevant” adds another important factor.

Timebound

Check some of the outputs you’re currently putting in your applications. If you hadn’t been using the acronym, there’s a fair chance they weren’t SMART, most likely because they weren’t measurable. 

Most proposal have some extra, broader statements of benefit. However, good quality work has a clear SMART core to the benefits. 

Structure and group the benefits carefully

Be careful if you throw everything you can into the benefits section. The way the mind works (according to behavioural economics) it could potentially have an “averaging” effect on the reader, whereby they do not pick out the key benefits as so important and it can appear to devalue the effect. So, your writing needs focus. A few ways to deal with this:

• Being selective
• Spotlight the key benefits in a couple of paragraphs, then have another paragraph that highlights the sheer range of benefits, listing them
• Use a structure that keeps growing. For example,  

“Our new homelessness outreach service will achieve at least three important life changes for 25 rough sleepers:

• “30 people will attend our day centre, accessing healthy food and a range of useful courses
• “15 people will register with GPs, improving their health
• “5 people will start to engage services to address drug and/or alcohol issues
• “£20,000 in additional personal welfare benefits for 10 people
• “15 people will be off the streets, resettled in accommodation
• “3 will be kept out of stays in custody
• “At least 10 would have significantly turned their situations around, escaping from the complex of issues that were ruining their lives.”

[Note: the above example is totally made up.]

Miscellaneous thoughts about benefits

If your service is relatively common (or looks like another that is) then the assessor may have certain assumptions about the scale of outcomes. However, it’s not like tendering – you do not need to be stretching to promise the maximum change you can.

Quantified benefits aren’t actually required by some trusts, at least in some cases

I’ve been involved with two different charities that didn’t have quantified benefits in their proposals. Comparing with another related charity in one case, it appears to be something that works with some trusts and doesn’t with others. I suspect it only works with a minority, at least for adult service users, but can build to significant numbers over time.

The couple of cases where no benefits were listed worked in a field where staffing ratios needed to be very high to enable the service users to access the service and as a result, numbers helped would have been particularly low / costs per head particularly high and progress slower (e.g., due to cognitive issues that service users experienced). It would be interesting to know whether those trusts tend to overlook numbers in such fields of work.

How the emotions and hard numbers need to work in this section

Behavioural economics indicates that empathy rather than hard facts moves people when they’re doing something new to them. It also says that, if people are engaging their logical minds, this actually reduces the extent to which they’re engaging their hearts. 

The reader is coming to the end of the proposal and they’ve probably just been very intellectually, much more than emotionally, engaged by the previous sections. Hopefully they’ve come to care about your work from the Need section, but they won’t necessarily be fired up about your actual solution to the problems. However, you also need to convince in a hard headed way about value for money. 

There are two reasons to open emotionally. Firstly, simply to keep them feeling emotionally engaged as they read. Secondly because rhetoric theory is that people are more likely to go along with your points if they’re emotionally on your side, so you might as well try and do that before you give them your impacts data to evaluate.

You also want them to get as close to coming away from reading feeling emotionally engaged as you can. So, it’s best not to end on something they’ve engaged their left brains for.

I therefore recommend the following structure to the benefits section:

• Try and reconnect the reader with the emotional heart of the proposal
• Cover the hard numbers
• Finish with real emotional punch 

What people at this stage is a real, human picture of lives changed due to the work. There are different ways you can do the above structure. So for example a benefits section at the end of a four page proposal might be structured:

• Reminder of the need in a line or so and what the project aims to do
• The impact numbers, but fleshed out slightly to show what that means
• A discussion of what these changes lives actually look like at the end

Alternatively:

• An output number of service users and discussion of what their changed lives are like
• The impact numbers, but fleshed out slightly to show what that means
• Something to give real emotional impact at the end – e.g., your strongest quote that fits the context

You might append a case study. However, I don’t personally rely on that to engage people, as it might not get read.

Whereas the Need section will often benefit from being written in a state of concern, the outcomes (and even the project) section benefit from being written from a state of enthusiasm and compassion. I usually know the rational details well enough to incorporate them precisely at this point. Again, you need to get there – for me, it is listening to euphoric dance music or writing first thing when I have been for a run, but again, documentaries and past experiences help. Trust fundraising is not a purely mechanical process, it is better done when you genuinely care about people, want the best for them and connect to that.

As in the Need section, Nancy Duarte’s approach to moving people seems to produce impactful writing. The Outcomes section is about people’s future lives, but if you also dot your text with brief references/allusions back to their present, you create a contrast that emphasises the importance of change.  As you near the end, your reader is hopefully most convinced and open to be moved, but we have seen that what most moves people to act is actually lack. So, getting them to connect with their compassion from earlier will add to the power of your message.