How trusts decide

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The material on this page is for beginners. If you have at least three years experience, you might start with the following page: https://goodgrantfundraising.org.uk/how-trusts-allocate-grants/.

The process is very largely paper-based: you send in the application, occasionally they’ll get in touch to ask the odd question and then you either hear or (more often) you don’t, which is how you learn you’ve been turned down. It can take a long time for them to decide (at one charity, only 50% of our applications to “cold” trusts, the ones who hadn’t funded us, were considered in the first four months after applying – and some took as long as 18 months to be considered).

Technically, the final decisions are taken by the trustees. So, that’s how everyone talks about things: getting everything ready for the trustees to decide.

An easy way to think about the process is that it goes as follows:

1. Screening out applications that won’t go anywhere. There are three ways this happens:

   1. The application is ineligible. For this reason, it’s extremely important to you as an applicant that you ensure you’re focussing your efforts on applications that are eligible. Ineligible applications don’t get a lot of thought: you won’t somehow claw your way towards eligibility just by having a great idea, instead, trusts are often happy to be able to reject you easily, cutting down the huge volumes of material they have to consider.

   2. The application is incomplete. Some bigger trusts will chase you for details, but the rest will just reject you out of hand.

   3. The timing is wrong. Trusts can be very strict with deadlines: I’ve been doing this for nearly 30 years and we once had a mix-up that meant an application went in a fortnight late. Even though the trust had been funding us for 20 years and we were one of their biggest grants each year, it still didn’t fund us, because we’d missed the boat.

2. Eliminating weaker applications, until they can do step 3. The biggest considerations are usually: how important to us is the need; the scale of impact; and quite often whether the project is free of significant risks that it won’t deliver, if the money is given.

There can be other considerations regarding what the trust sees as a strong application. For example, some trusts largely want to back charities that they’ve backed before (at least, until the mess up); and some trusts, at least, are swayed by a proposal with a strong emotional