Extreme views

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The material on this site is for beginners. The website has a lot of other pages that are for experienced trust fudnraisers.

There are as many opinions about trust fundraising as there are trust fundraisers. There’s so much luck and so many unknowns, it may never become a science. However, you occasionally hear things that most experienced trust fundraisers would view as pretty extreme and hard to justify. This page will try and address some of these.

“Trusts only fund innovation”

This isn’t true of any of the seven different rusts I’ve been involved with. When I was at Back Up, we typically raised £350k-£450k p.a., a lot of it from the same trusts each year, and for the first four or five years we did almost no new innovative work in any of the years. (We did grow the odd existing service, though.)

One or two well networked trusts staff or funders, such as Bridget O’Brien-Twohigg, have been pretty outspoken and critical of the lack of real innovation funding out there. The argument that critics of the sector will make is: yes, trusts can pay lip service to innovation, but they are also risk averse. This means that they are loathe in practice to actually get involved in innovations, because most real innovations will, by their very nature, fail.

I know successful trust fundraisers would say that the “real money” is available to you only if you have innovative projects. That’s a more defensible argument. A more defensible one again, I’d say, is that you’ll raise more money by growing existing services.

However, I still think you need to look closely at your key targets to see if they’d do as well if you tried to get them to fund your existing work. It will probably vary and my own view is: it’s something you need to research, rather than having fixed views about.

“Trust fundraisers should never develop projects, that’s the job of Services”

It’s fair to say that a trust fundraiser shouldn’t be developing much work in their first years. There’s a lot to lose if you don’t quite know what you’re doing, you lack political antennae for what will work and what won’t and you’ve got plenty of other things to get good at. It’s certainly an approach with pitfalls. There’s also the downside that if you’re making up bits of the project, that’s time you’re not spending pumping out more proposals.

However, I’ve gone into charities and revealed I could do that and I’ve been greeted by staff saying, “At last, a proper fundraiser.” It’s also almost a myth that some sections can be written without drafting the project as you go along.

My own view would be: it helps to keep an open mind and see where the needs of organisations take you.

“Applications need to be kept extremely short” (e.g., two sides of A4) OR “Applications can be extremely long, so you can get in all the project detail / arguments / evidence”

Having experienced the time pressures and challenges of reading a lot as a grants assessor, I can see the sense to the view of the great behavioural psychologist/contributor to behavioural economics, Daniel Kahneman. He says that the most effective way you can influence someone is to make it easier for them to say yes.

However, in my view, the fact is that trusts need a certain level of detail to see what the project is, that its adequately thought through, that there’s an important need and important benefits, etc. If you see the length of trust’s forms and add in the odd other issue that you know many trusts would be interested in, it will give you a sense of a natural length for the trusts. Then you have to bear in mind the amount of time it take you to summarise things (most people write longer, then cut) and decide: would you be raising more money if you spent that time on more applications, or not?

I worked with someone who was a strong proponent of two page applications. When I looked into how they actually raised their money, it seemed like a lot of it actually came from their longer applications.

Please don’t take what I’m saying too far. I’m only arguing that one- and two-page applications seem to have a more limited place: the domain of trusts taking particularly quick decisions (e.g.: those likely to give you under £5k of they give; maybe some others with no staff). The issue of “what’s the right length” is a debate we’ll probably be having from many years to come.

Conversely, though, if you’re writing several pages for (realistically) a £10k grant, that could easily be too much. I have seen very long bids be successful and I’ve never seen a trust I was at refuse to read a very long application (probably down to the fact that most used forms or specified lengths). HOWEVER, I’ve occasionally seen trusts give ‘providing reams of unnecessary information’ as a reason for rejection and I also know how busy trusts personnel are and what a bad idea it is to antagonise them.