Photos: Adam Winger and (insert) William Iven, on Unsplash
This webpage is for trust fundraisers with three or more years’ experience. Beginners should use this page instead.
Impact is at the core of a strong proposal, but some funders are swayed by excellence, as well. So, as you go through, consider if you can signal this. For example, at a trust where I assessed, my manager told me he would always look to fund projects where the annual reports featured a picture of a visit by a Government Minister, because the civil servants who chose the projects for them to see made strong choices and the charity’s would be very high quality. (I hasten to add that this conversation pre-dated the collapse of Kids Company by some years!)
So, as you go through, consider if you can signal excellence.
More obvious ways are: accreditations, awards and high independent rating scores; excellence ratings from service users; presenting the work to impressive bodies; sparkling independent evaluations; photos of genuinely significant dignitaries visiting the project.
You may want to invest a little time in trying to nudge your Services (or in some cases, you Comms team, if you have one) towards getting (or sharing) these! I’m not personally sure there’s enough financial benefit to replace the time taken applying for applications with time taken applying for awards.
A more subtle approach to use with genuinely knowledgeable assessors is that you weave through the text points that address the key issues for the particular service or service sector. For example, working at an addiction charity I might not make so much of the relapse rates, but if I knew the trust understood the sector well, how the service fitted into the journey of recovery, including relapses, would signal we were doing “proper” work.