Good Grant Fundraising

Project description

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The material on this site is currently for people with at least three years’ trust fundraising experience.

Aims/goals/objectives

It helps to start with a short statement of what the project is for – it orientates the reader. What follows in the project description should flow from it, in the sense that the project is what you’re doing to achieve those objectives.

(How do these three, not universally defined, terms relate? Aims/goals are synonymous and objectives break the one or two goals/aims down a bit further. How far should you break down aims/objectives? Do what seems necessary to give a clear description of the project and a sense that the service knows where it’s going, given the limited space you usually have.)

Actually, the objectives of the work are a very top level, summary of the benefits of the project (e.g. for some day centre activities, “to increase the social involvement and wellbeing of older people”). So, it make sense to revisit this when you’ve actually done the benefits section, to make sure everything fits together. It’s better to have the aims/objectives in mind to begin with, so that there’s a clear purpose to the work, but you may need to tweak later on.

Description of activities

Much of the body of the project description is the who, what and where of the project.

How much detail to go into?

  • This depends on the length of the proposal. However, if you read the description and it looks like the project could be delivered in a couple of different ways, the chances are it’s not precise enough.

  • You need to make sure you’ve at least largely covered what the project actually does. This is what the funder’s money will be spent on, so it’s unfair if you’re effectively using part of that money for something else.

Projects need to be fairly well planned. How well planned, you can guess from the length of the form you’re having to fill in and maybe from a chat to the grants officers if they’re more professional. However, the underlying logic of trust fundraising leads to fairly well planned projects:

  • Trusts can only compare proposals with each other if the costs and outcomes are there. However, you only know those once you’ve done the development work.

  • The costs and outcomes need to look realistic and the project needs to not have significant risks. Again, that indicates a good level of development.

  • Some trusts will give you extra credit for well thought through work.

Let’s suppose that you need to change the project to address the actual, real world when the services staff confront it. Trusts are often flexible about that, though if the chance is significant, you’ll need to agree it with them.

At the same time as saying you need good project definition and development, the reality is that planning a new project is something that a service manager is fitting in alongside their busy job, which possibly wasn’t designed with capacity for such things. So, you sometimes have to get what you can. When you’re more experienced, you might start pitching in and developing bits of the project yourself, as you write it up.

The fashion in project planning is increasingly for “agile” methods of project development and management. An “agile” approach assumes that development is iterative: you don’t know exactly where you’re going, but you keep taking steps forward, learning, reviewing and redeveloping. The attractions of this methodology are hard to dispute in the case of very innovative or complex new work, especially. However, as a methodology it’s simply unsuitable for trust applications and occasionally you’ll need to spot and argue against it if the costs need to be funded from a grant.

As you’re writing this part of the application, you need to focus on the big points. However, it’s also valuable to say something in passing about the points where there are risks to delivery. For example:

  • Partnerships: if there will be one, I’d write a paragraph at least on how it will work.

  • Getting referrals: where they will come from

  • The more challenging aspects of delivery – for example: engaging alienated groups who’ll be important to the success of your work; managing demand, if it could fluctuate; getting schools to work with you, if you’re delivering in classrooms; staying involved consistently enough with rough sleepers to make a difference. You’re looking for challenges that someone with a passing knowledge of the sector might think of.

Normally when descriptions of services aren’t clear, it’s either because the development work hasn’t been done, you don’t understand the project or there are issues in the writing structure that you’ve chosen.