Getting an assessment

Pictures: Keira Burton on Pexels and (insert) Dylan Gillis on Unsplash

This webpage was written for trust fundraisers with three or more years’ experience.

You’ve just heard the assessor wants to meet

The main things you need to do are:

• To chase up any outstanding development work on the project (I don’t advise this, but: occasionally things didn’t all quite get done before submission of Stage 2 and you might have had to be a bit vague in the submission about precisely when the development work happens; now you need to ensure it really did happen, so the forms aren’t lying to the funder!!)
• Speak to everyone on the project and just check that the project hasn’t changed (and you may have to act if it has been). Staff, usually senior ones, can make last minute changes to the model. In doing so, they are often oblivious of the fact that with a complicated and highly interrelated application dependent on a lot of development work, late changes can seriously damage your chances. You need to evaluate the impact of the changes you discover and determine an appropriate course of action – from a few words of explanation at the pre-assessment meeting, through some emergency extra development work, right up to getting your own Director to tell their counterpart in Services that, actually, it is too late for that change to the work.
• Sort out who will take part in the assessment meeting.  It will normally be:

o   Yourself

o   Whoever’s down as project managing the project.

o   Whoever developed the project (sometimes a more junior member of staff)

o   Sometimes there are other questions that participants can’t answer (e.g., on finances or the trustees). So it is useful to have the relevant people at least prepped and on standby so that you can fetch them into the room.

• Try and ensure the very key people aren’t on holiday in the week after the assessment (and especially yourself).  There can be bits of last minute development work or writing up and assessors often have tight timescales to meet after they’ve seen you.
• Get everyone who will be involved in the assessment meeting to re-read the relevant materials. With busy staff and a lot of paper to plough through, this is easier said than done before the pre-meeting.  However, the importance generally comes through in that pre- meeting and people will usually do their homework before the call.
• If the people in the room don’t understand the kind of things trusts occasionally like to know about – organisation’s financial procedures, governance – someone (normally you!) will need to swat up on them so that you can field questions.

The Pre-Assessment meeting:

Without a good pre-meeting meeting, the most senior person in the room may be tempted to wing it and the rest of the bid team won’t know enough what’s going on. On the other hand, a good pre-meeting meeting will not only notably improve your chances of a grant. It will enable the rest of the group to realize that you really do know what you’re doing, there’s more to this fundraising than meets the eye, and you must have a lot of skills – which is a genuine help long term, sometimes.

• This should happen at least a week before the assessment meeting, in case there is any very last minute tweaking of things required
• It’s best to recap in a few minutes what the project, the application and the assessment call are about.  It’s just possible that not everyone will have been involved so far. You’ll need to prepare this, so that you don’t get lost in your explanation and sit there droning on. (I speak from experience!)
• Explain what will happen.
• You need to agree with participants which questions they’ll lead on (but it’s fine if other people jump in with answers). As a rule of thumb you should leave most of the questions to the others and spend your time listening and trouble-shooting during the assessment call.  You need to be seen to be talking a bit or it can start to seem uncomfortable, but your main role in the meeting will be to listen hard and trouble shoot. You don’t want too many distractions from that, unless you don’t trust the other members of the assessment meeting team. You’ll also: introduce everyone, agree next steps at the end with the funder and there are usually one or two points in the call where you will need to explain what precisely was meant by answers on the form. So there’s that for you to do, at least.
• If people haven’t done these things before, it’s worth asking them a few mock questions. It just gets them in the frame of mind.
• If it’s going to come out during close questioning of the work by the Assessor that you did quite a bit of development work, you need to have a justification prepared for that.  There are two possible answers to this:
  • Think back through your personal CV.  Maybe you actually have ample qualifications. (Some fundraisers have.)
  • You did the work under the supervision of the Service Manager, who was qualified and they checked everything.  Hopefully that was the case for you!
• You need to highlight what the funder looks for 
• Make sure everyone in the room is aware of elements of the project that are not standard with the model of this work that you normally use.
• You need to go through the lines of argument within the bid, so that everyone understands how they should put things.  Likewise, no doubt as you were writing the bid it was clear that there were ways the work is sometimes described that you shouldn’t say in this assessment, so you need to tell participants what NOT to say.  Even if there’s nothing that is crucial to raise so that meeting participants are up to speed, it’s good to bring up some points about the lines of argument, anyway.  The chances are, there were one or two people sitting in your pre-meeting meeting who thought they might be able to wing this meeting without reading the papers.  By highlighting the underlying arguments, you’re highlighting that bids are constructed in a subtle way. These “wing it” people will then normally realize their mistake!
• You need to share with participants that if a question is impossible to answer there and then, the funder should allow you some time after the meeting to furnish the information.  Your project should be fully developed, but not everyone 100% needs to be in the room or all the materials to be there. Occasionally this is a useful get-out.
•  You also need to ensure there is a room you can do this assessment meeting in.  Best to allow two hours, just in case.
• At the end of the pre-meeting meeting, I like to big things up a bit and remind people to come in confident. Just as in a job interview an initial impression of confidence helps, I think there’s some of that with assessment meetings, too.
• It’s flattering for the assessor to be introduced to someone like the CEO – but they’ll need a briefing (see the page on working with senior staff) so they know what to say.

This is a checklist of these points (it’s hard to ensure you’ve covered everything in the meeting, otherwise):

Getting your personal ABCs to be “on brand”

Sometimes you can mostly lurk in the background in a meeting and you don’t need to be projecting a particular impression, that much. (That can be a good thing: you’re listening hard,ready to troubleshoot and to action points after the meeting.) In this context, the funder often wants to hear things “from the horse’s mouth” – it’s kind of why they’re there.

However, sometimes you’ll have a bigger part – because you’re filling in for other key players who aren’t in the room, say, or the meeting will be a lot about the written bid, or the precise budget you constructed. Then you’ll need to project a certain way and the “ABC” formulation of your personal brand from Ross and Segal’s Making the Ask is worth considering:

Attitude What emotional attitudes should you be conveying to align with the charity and the situation? If it’s an arts project, donors may be in it for excitement and fun, so conveying a bit of enthusiasm and a sense of adventure/fun in the work may be worth considering. On the other hand, when I worked in a children’s hospice the issues were potentially very serious and the assessors could be a little overwhelmed just walking in the door. A more congruent attitude was compassionate, but working to put people at ease and to get them to appreciate the preciousness of the time and opportunities the children had.

Beliefs Bill Bruty, like good rhetoricians, highlights the value of bringing out values shared by the donor and the project. Again, is the focus on fun (as above) or being entrepreneurial but risk-aware for an innovative project, or committed to excellence and rigorously evidence-based for a basic science project, or what?

Competences You’ll need to know the detail of the bid, but do you need to be “good enough to pass” on other areas that you’re overing in? After you’ve been fundraising for something for a decent while, you can probably get by in it, with the odd point that you’ll have to come back to the assessor on. Quite often the Services staff will know enough to bail you out. However, you may want to swot up a bit on it.

Come emotionally prepared

Anyone who’s worked with me will know I tend to pop off to the look shortly before a big meeting, if there’s time. Some of that is nerves and a tendency to drink too much tea during the day. However, I do something else, too. Watch Amy Cuddy’s TED talk on power poses. By physically standing (in private) in a power pose for a short time, head up, chest out, arms up or on my hips, legs a bit wider, it increases the confidence for a bit and I can breeze into the meeting ready to make a better impression.

However, in Making the Ask Ross and Segal suggest a more flexible approach to triggering the right mental states bang on cue, without having to work yourself up to it. It relies on a behavioural science technique called “anchoring”:

• Identify the emotional states that you want to have immediately on tap at a key moment: a sense of confident but attentive listening; caring strongly about the cause; enthusiasm for the charity, whatever it is.
• Close your eyes and bring clearly and strongly to mind for a minute or so the strongest example you can think of of you actually feeling just that way.
• While you do it, do something unique (i.e., that you won’t do casually) but unobtrusive, that will immediately remind you of that feeling. For example, I push my thumbnail into one of my knuckle joints for the feeling in control but attentive and into the top of my middle finger for compassionate concern.
• Once you can do it a bit, practice doing it more, including in “real world” situations: with your eyes open, try it in a “low stakes meeting”, etc. then, you’ve got it if you need to stop panicking, or quickly “go big”.
• If you need to read more on this, look for ‘anchoring NLP’ online.

The assessment meeting

• It’s a bit like job interviews in the sense that, if you go in looking pretty confident then that will help. Don’t worry about the subtle issues that are wrong with the project. Unless your assessor is very expert, they won’t notice. Also, I saw for myself from assessor training that most assessors are kinder about your project than a trust fundraiser would be.
• Bring sets of all the papers to the meeting for everyone.
• Try and arrange for the key person to be opposite the assessor – the person opposite is who they’ll give most attention and weight to (Cialdini (2016) ibid.)
• Listen very hard in assessment for issues. Troubleshooting is your main job and it’s an important one.
• As mentioned under “writing”, in job applications, applicants who spent some time thinking of themselves as powerful wrote more successful applications than applicants who thought of themselves as powerless beforehand. Being in the right emotional “space” will help in this respect as well as others. Also, practicing open and expensive body language reduces stress and increases confidence. Carney, D.R., Cuddy, A.J.C., & Yapp, A.J. (2010) Power posing: Brief non-verbal displays cause changes in neuroendocrine levels and risk tolerance, Psychological Science 21, 1363-1368. Amy Cuddy has a good TED talk on this.
• If you can, try and avoid making your key point just before the assessor looks like they’re going to talk – they may not hear you because they are rehearsing what they will say (Cialdini(2016))
• In my experience, applicants haven’t been that good at telling what I’m thinking about their work. A few things that might help:
  • If the assessor goes still and fixed on the situation, maybe with thor eyes more open, maybe with their pupils dilating a bit, David J Lieberman, author of You Can Read Anyone, would say that something important’s probably happening. I’ve seen this myself when we’ve been doing well but I’ve said something that momentarily seems to go against the project.
  • If you can try and get them to do something – such as checking back on a point of uncertainty for them about what their funder thinks and come back to you – then you can try and judge if it’s worth it to them to do it. Robert Cialdini would say that they also like to be consistent, so if they’ll do it, the chance of them then deciding to go into bat for your project is higher.
  • Drawing on Lieberman’s ideas: you can say something that indicates your project is unsuitable and then explain how it’s actually suitable. If you see them become worried and then relaxed, they’re a little attached to the result, i.e., things going well for you. If they aren’t bothered either way, they might be just going through the motions with you because you’ve already blown it (or they might be okay with your work, but just not that into it).
• At the end of the meeting, it’s worth checking with the assessor if there is anything they think you haven’t answered adequately.  It won’t always be clear as you go along whether you’re saying the right things. (My experience as an assessor is that people drop themselves in it and don’t realize, also they score highly and don’t realize – it’s like interviews, really.) This can be a last chance to spot issues and sort things out. If you need to be a little more direct, “Does a positive recommendation for a grant of £X make sense?” is a slightly more gentle way to put them on the spot.
• If you’ve clearly screwed up, it’s worth trying to formulate a Plan B in the meeting. Some trusts just want to assess what’s on paper, then move on. However, other trusts will let you pause things to rework the project, or withdraw the application and resubmit.
• I like to follow up the meeting with a warm note with some key points. It’s like an interview, again. (My editor said to mention doing the same for the participants from your own charity. That sounds like good advice.)