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The material on this page is for beginners. If you have three or more years’ experience of trust fundraising, you may find more useful the pages about bid writing associated with the following page: https://goodgrantfundraising.org.uk/signalling-excellence-when-writing-proposals/.
One of the reasons why trusts can reject you is that they’re sceptical that you’re really going to deliver what you say. It might be that it’s not clear that you’ll definitely get the project off the ground / keep it going, or maybe it’s not clear that it will deliver the benefits you claim.
There are several points to cover regarding this:
I’ve seen assessors reject things on the grounds that it’s simply not clear what’s going on. It’s important for your applications that you:
Get Services to commit at least the essentials of the project (there’s sometimes some fuzziness around the edges with new work, that’s usually okay)
Write things up clearly and comprehensibly.
I sat in an Association of Charitable Foundations assessors training meeting where we were discussing a case study. The project description had big holes in – in places you’d worry, for example about serious safeguarding issues.
The trainer then said: “What I didn’t tell you is that the staff are all highly qualified” and she rattled off a long list of accomplishments related to the work.
The attitude of the assessors changed immediately. Whereas before, nearly everyone would have rejected it, suddenly nearly everyone would be okay to see it in their portfolio of funded work.
To give two more stories in the same vein:
I worked for a charity with truly hopeless, untrained Regional bid-writers who were nevertheless quite successful. The reason was that the charity was trusted.
I worked for a grant-maker that used to fund most people who applied who had a picture of a Minister visiting in their annual report, because it was a clear sign of recognition.
In the real world, I’d be sceptical about whether you’d actually get funded if you failed to tick all the boxes. Well run trusts like to say it’s not about the project presentation, it’s about the real situation behind it. That’s not always been my experience, though. However, I think this annecdote still demonstrated how important expertise is.
New work raises a lot more questions than existing work. With existing projects, even if you haven’t explained everything clearly and allayed all concerns, a strong track record can suggest that those missing details don’t matter too much.
There are trusts out there who genuinely do want very new and innovative things, or who are excited to see you breaking new ground. However, most funders are more conservative than that. It’s a subject of real criticism by the genuinely innovative funders, who accuse their colleagues of doublespeak: they say they like innovation, but what they really want to know is that, if they give you the grant, it really will deliver.
Perhaps the most fundable projects are those that take well-proven work and expand it or transplant it to a new location.
This is a subtle point and you may spend years really getting to grips with it. You probably don’t have the time, or space on paper, to try to address every single risk in your project. Nor will your Services colleagues be happy to answer the tiniest of your worries about delivery, when they have jobs to get on with. So, where to you draw the line?
If you are an experienced Services manager and someone describes any project to you, there will be things you might notice as a potential risk even though it isn’t your field of work at all. The risk might be around:
staff having the skills for the job,
everyone involved falling under the manager who leads the project, so good team-working can be ensured
the ability to manage demand, rather than get swamped or end up with no clients
ability to raise the rest of the money
Organisational finances (or having so much money the charity is not perceived as in need)
Safeguarding issues
Potential to recruit staff/volunteers who fit the specification
The plans are clear and specific enough that the model looks thought through enough to achieve the planned impacts
The costings including the salary level look right
…and so on
Secondly, it’s only the important risks that matter. At the same Association of Charitable Foundations session (above) the trainer stressed the importance of “significant” risks – but her observation was that when she’d once given the same training exercise to a group of trust fundraisers, they’d been noticeably more stringent in rejecting projects for risk to delivery than actual trust assessors were!
Sure, if the Trust spots a few things that look a bit questionable it isn’t great and it’s 100% a good idea to make the proposal as watertight as you can. (Also, you’ll doubtless get the odd rejection for reasons that you’d regard as silly.) However, few project proposals answer all the questions and you need to try and spot the things that will probably matter.
Ask the Service Manager or a more experienced colleague in Fundraising if you aren’t sure whether it’s a genuinely significant risk, or not.
Strong proposals are confident and positive. If there are risks to delivery, there’s a sense that they are controlled, with plenty of high quality to be applied to ensure they aren’t an issue.
For example, don’t say, “We don’t expect to have safeguarding issues because…” Say “We are NSPCC trained and use safeguarding processes based on world-leading models”
I was at a highly peer-led charity where we used peer mentors, peer trainers, peer just about everything. Early in the proposal I’d include a brief organisation description and in that I’d mention that we were internationally-leading experts, a claim I’d substantiate. It’s the kind of thing you’d want to mention anyway, but I’d feature it earlier and more prominently than I might otherwise, because I knew the prejudices people had about peer-led work. Attitude research indicates that people perceive peer-led organisations as amateurish. By changing the whole context of the discussion, I aimed to ensure that below average expertise didn’t occur to the assessor as a possibility.
When you’ll more experienced, I’ll suggest in the “intermediate writing” pages that you finesse this, allowing some issues to come up because it looks more rounded and convincing. However, it’s a good discipline to learn to write a positive description – and for the first period of your career, that’s probably enough to think about.
This is an excellent place to get really bogged down and unable to send out proposals, or to write proposals that are too long for the funder. As with a lot of trust fundraising, it’s hard to be perfect and you just do what you reasonably can.