Extreme research techniques

Photos: Matthew Henry and (insert) Farah, on Burst. (In training, I used to use a photo of someone jumping out of an aircraft whilst typing on their computer. Sadly, I don’t have a licence for it!)

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

Introduction

As a funder, I’ve quite often felt that applicants have had a lot they could say to persuade us, but they haven’t recognised clearly enough the kind of funder we are in order to make their best case. For example: how much precision about outcomes do we need? How human do the stories have to be? What key interests to address? Some of that can be addressed through good bid-writing skills, but some is simply the result of not really understanding the funder. Not that a lot of funders try hard to make themselves thoroughly comprehensible. 

The information is normally out there, though. It’s just a huge amount of work to do, to mine everything you really could do.

As with a lot of the issues covered by this website, a lot of the time your normal work is fine and you don’t need to be doing anything exceptional. You know that – your methods have been working. However, two questions:

• What can you do when you absolutely have to understand the funder because the grant is vital?
• Can you give yourself an edge more generally?

It may feel like time is hurtling past and you’re still researching. Like you’ve thrown yourself out of a plane and the ground is coming towards you. You’re behaving differently because the opportunity is worth more. Doing Reaching Communities applications, which are very big and there always used to be a lot you could usefully know, if I hadn’t spent two days just on researching the funder – not the project – I’d be really worried I’d have missed something. 

It may be scary, but it should still be in a controlled way, because you know that for excellent work, you need to make extra time. With the big applications, Of all the people who are involved in the fundraising bid, only you know the funder. When do you reach the point that you really do, so that all the other time you are putting in is being well applied?

Googling, to find example grants and other details concerning the funder

I’ll go into this, not because Googling isn’t obvious stuff, but because people don’t always know how to do a good search:

• Don’t use other, more limited, search engines (e.g., Bing)
• Search for: ‘ “[name of the trust] site:.org.uk’ (which searches for exactly the name from charity web sites) You may need to leave off the initials from the Trust name
• Search for ‘ “[name of the trust] site:.org’ in the same way, but choosing the UK as the Region under Advanced search 
• Read the snippets and webpage names: may the result describe a grant from the funder?, or is it, e.g., a general description of the Trust published by an umbrella charity?
• If it might be relevant, add the page to a reading list using the “Star” function in Chrome, or open the web page in a new tab
• Keep building up a bank of possibly relevant pages until you’ve a lot and are at the bottom of a page of search results. Then, look at all the pages

Alternatives to Googling:

• Check the accounts of grant recipients, using the “find” function to locate the name of the funder. If the “find” function doesn’t work, you can check the restricted income notes (and maybe the narrative). Note: Google rarely picks up details in accounts at the Charity Commission, so this is additional work.
• CIoF Trust Fundraising email group used to answer questions about what shadowy Trusts were doing. No one’s tried for a while, but they possibly still would

Speaking to the fundraiser at recipient charities

When you really, really need to know and there’s too little online, you can call other successful applicants. It needs a bit of brass neck, but actually the vast majority of the Trust fundraisers you’ll speak to are happy to give a little time and sympathetic, especially if it sounds like you’ve a decent chance but can’t make use of it due to lack of essential knowledge. CEOs are more competitive because of all the time spent on tenders, but can still be very nice and helpful. 

It’s been hard to get people on the phone during the pandemic. However, when I’ve had to do this, I’ve still had good success by emailing and fixing up calls. It takes longer and you need more names to start with.

How you do it is:

• Find their contact details online, ring and ask for the person who does the Trust applications
• If it will be a CEO (it’s a lot of money and small/medium charity) call at 9.30
• Slip in something showing you’re not close competition (e.g., you ring the Devon CAB and say “I’m from Arbroath Advice”)
• You’re usually appealing to their kindness, not bargaining
• Ask your questions and let them talk
• However, be a bit sceptical about their knowledge. People don’t know as much as they think, sometimes. You have to get responses from enough people for the truth to really shine through

Using consultancies for their knowledge

There are big, specialist consultancies like Wootton George, that will have insights into the interests of trusts where these aren’t published. If you contract them to do some research for you, you can tap into this. The bigger ones are expensive, you might end up paying several hundred pounds a day. if it’s the only way to transform your understanding of large trusts and to grow your portfolio, maybe that’s money well spent, if you have it?

Bill Bruty accounts research

Bill is one of the gurus in our sector. (You’ll have picked up that I’m a fan.) He does an interesting course looking at the finances side of the accounts, which people tend not to look too deeply into. It will deepen your understanding of the work, to a degree. 

He’s clearly fascinated by accounts. He makes a good point that it’s hard for people to “get” this stuff in the abstract and I think there’s a good case for going on his course, if the benefits below sound worth it to you.

There are two underlying themes that he explores:

• How to see a bit more clearly again which trusts are comatose (what he would call “zombie trusts”) and which are actually very active and worth trying to engage (trusts he would call “tiggers”). So, for example:
  • If the giving is at a very steady level, purely from income and the expenditure on staffing is very low, the trust’s more likely to actually be a zombie. You’re not as likely to get much of a response from it. Charitable trusts can be set up with company shares fundamentally as a way to make it harder for the family company to get purchased by a hostile outside agency – so, if the capital is all held in one company, that CAN be a possible sign of a zombie trust. Likewise, if income is well under 3% of capital, that’s a poor rate of return and again, might make you wonder how serious about the trust the trustees actually are.
  • If there’s more staffing, more variation in grants, the grants seem to be taking some account of gains and losses on investments (probably not in a linear way) and/or there’s more income coming into the trust (probably from the founder) then there’s more life and more potential in the trust.

At this stage, you might reasonably object: “I can see perfectly well whether the trust is properly active, by opening lots of grants lists and comparing giving in different years”. What Bill’s analysis adds is a subtle variation on that normal picture:  

• I think he’s saying that a trust might have potential occasionally, where you wouldn’t have seen it otherwise. 
• Conversely and I suspect more importantly, he might also argue to watch out for apparently changeable grants lists, that aren’t really changing as much as it appears. That’s because the trust is actually just cycling between established lists of clients. They don’t really have the energy to take seriously an application from a “newbie” like yourselves. That means that the door might not be as open to you as it appears at first sight.

• Bill’s second big theme is how to see where there is potential extra spending coming up / cuts. There seem to be two kinds of such spending changes:
  • Big splurges, which are usually given to something different from the interests shown in their normal grants lists. (Bill does holds out the slight possibility that you could still get one of those huge grants – as he thinks an underlying reason why the “normal” beneficiaries of the trust don’t get the income when a trust decides to “have a party” is that they don’t think their normal beneficiaries are capable of handling money on that scale. Clearly, that’s a view you could try and disabuse them of!)
  • Periodic policy changes, maybe once every three or five years, usually reflecting changed monies available to give. If the trust has gradually been getting bigger (or smaller) and they take that into account in their giving (rather than just focusing on income) – or in the rare instance that income does change – then it could prompt a periodic rethink. That’s an opportunity or threat for you. Bill thinks: get in as soon as you can in the new period.

Bill’s ideas about this might perhaps be becoming more relevant now than they have ever been. As of December 2021, analyses in the USa are pointing to major increases in the capital of the biggest foundations, leading to significantly increased grantmaking. (A Chronicle of Philanthropy article of 08.12.21 identified mean increases in assets, at the top end, of 12%) We’ll need to keep an eye on what happens in the UK.

A third point he makes is: in some trusts, the cash and cash equivalent that they have can give you a rough idea of how much they’re planning to spend in the future. If there’s a lot of cash, they may be planning a substantial gift.

If they’re converting all their holdings into bonds, they’re likely to be planning to wind up in the next few years. (Trusts don’t necessarily convert to bonds before winding up, btw – it’s just a sensible technique.)

Anyway, as you’ll see, my advice is, if you’re seriously interested in this and the training budget stretches to it: you’ll get more out of going to some proper training.

Researching the trustees

If you have plenty of time on the trust, it’s worth looking at a couple of things, at least (these are a couple of tips from the big trust fundraising consultancy, Wootton George):

1. Click through their records at the Charity Commission, to see what else the trustees are involved in. It might add a little to your understanding of the interests of that particular trust. For example, if they also sit on the board of a children’s welfare charity, the chances are that, if you’ve a project within the trust’s clear interests that involves children in poverty, it might pique their interest
2. Is the money old money or new money? If it’s newly made, there is some chance that they’ll fit the giving patterns found by David Callahan and described in his book The Givers (though this book has a strong American slant):
   • Eschewing big staff teams
   • Backing leaders and ideas
   • Taking more genuine risks on innovations
   • Being more ambitious in terms of making big change (in the case of tech entrepreneurs especially, they both have a certain humility, but also a confidence and sense not just of agency but hyperagency)
   • Having perhaps a sharper focus on metrics

Finding additional funders (Beth Upton idea)

I’ve never tried this, so I can only pass on her thoughts… If the thing you’re fundraising for is extremely niche and you cannot identify other funders, she suggests trying ringing the funders and asking them who else funds that area. The theory is: funders know each other and hang out together, so they can know others in that field. She suggests that you ring and say you want to broaden your portfolio so you don’t have to be too dependent on key funders. (Money Tree YouTube video of March 2022)

My own experience of funders is that the ones I’ve worked for haven’t networked that much and if you see the attendances at Association of Charitable Foundation interest groups, for example, they aren’t that high.I’ve had big funders who’ve wanted to share names with me, but they’ve usually been in the mainstream. 

However, I can imagine that in some niches, for example in medical research, there could be a bit more mixing and specialist knowledge.