“Hey – why can’t we have one of those huge grants, not the normal ones?”

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

One of life’s great mysteries is that, given how fascinated senior staff seem to be with this subject, no one seems ever to have published a proper research on this issue. Trusts guru Bill Bruty has done some work in the area, I do know and he also knows more than he can publish. 

If no one else does, then I may tack it onto some of the interviews I’ll be trying to do for the site with trusts in the coming months and years.

At a 2021 webinar by St James’s Place Foundation and Zurich Community Trust, the trusts said they found massive requests from just any old charity to be off putting. This echoes occasional comments I’ve read over the years. Completely speculating: maybe they think the fundraiser can’t do their research?

Three factors behind huge grants

Many years ago, I did some “quick and dirty” research, taking in two trusts I was working for, big grants I’d seen and some desk research. (A particularly enthusiastic senior manager was pressing me to adopt the strategy, so it was as much to orientate her as to get my own ducks in a row.) I spotted three reasons for trusts giving their biggest grants in a particular field:

1. They’d been particularly engaged by the charity, even to the point of having a seat on the Board, though certainly in the case of charities that gave different massive grants each year, it didn’t need to be that level of involvement.
2. The project itself was absolutely massive, meaning that a huge grant was the only significant response that was possible. Think for example of the Garfield Weston Foundation’s £20m donation to the British Museum’s refurbishment of its Great Court. A lot of money, yes – but only 20% of the money fundraised for the development.
3. The trust had been convinced it can change the world. Think of The Gates Foundation making nine figure donations to malaria research. The trust was convinced that it was realistic to try and significantly reduce the impact of malaria – saving tens of thousands of lives worldwide, every year.

An interesting feature of the research was that the combination of those factors varied between trusts and/or between grants. 

For example, at a capital funder where I worked, the largest grant we gave in the year was to a massive project that had just written in, like everyone else.  We went to see them (because, hey, the grants committee needed to know we’d looked into it carefully). The fundraisers hadn’t networked closely with us – when we met, they actually seemed slightly bored with little us and our £50k grant, because the appeal was pretty much funded and our contribution was barely here or there. I can think of similar grants from the other charity and others funders I’ve been closely involved in. 

As against that, there are any number of stories of huge grants from trusts who’ve been “worked on” for very long periods – but when you look at them, they often seem to have one or both of the other two factors in play, too.

Bill Bruty’s fourth factor

Bill Bruty’s recent research would add another consideration. (More detail is under the “extreme research” page and the report on his web site.) He says that when trusts come into substantial additional capital, they can put (usually a small proportion) into a “splurge”, making very big grants. These are usually to different causes than the clients of the day-to-day grants. 

This might be of purely academic interest – except that Bill said at an October 2021 training event that he thought a key reason why ordinary applicants were overlooked was because the trustees didn’t see them as suitable, safe recipients of a massive grant. That might open the door a little – but you can immediately see that one or more of the three factors above would help you a lot at this point.