Photos: Tenille K Campbell and (insert) Jose Silva, Burst
The material on this page is for beginners. If you have at least three years’ experience as a trust fundraiser, you may find the following page more useful: https://goodgrantfundraising.org.uk/sources-of-information/.
The first key source is internal records. You’re the latest post-holder in a relationship, so you need to understand the relationship (even if it’s just one of continual rejections!) What you did with the Trust three years ago may be the last post-holder but one of you, but for the Trust it may only be six or 12 Trustees’ meetings back.
Maybe as many as half of all the problems I’ve ever had with relationships with funders have come from poor record keeping, bad handover and/or forgetting the detail of the relationship myself. You need to be up to speed.
Database
Charities generally have a database and if they aren’t at that level, there will be usually some kind of spreadsheet or at worst a Word document recording the same details. This should store details of all the contacts with the trust.
Folders
You need to skim the previous year’s papers, at least. Sometimes you’ll want to go back further.
Emails
I’d prefer to have access to my predecessor’s emails, as they may not have transferred everythign on email to the folders and database.
Hard copies
Although nearly everything is now kept virtually, once in a blue moon I’ve wanted to go back to the hard copies.
Financial records
Whether it’s from the database or somewhere else (e.g., the Finance people) I’d personally want the following financial information:
Details of the giving of any particular trust I’m looking at
Details of all gifts over the last year (dates, amounts and what the gifts were for) so that I can maintain relationships and my income budget / income flow for the year is grounded in something
The same details for each of the last five or ten years. This isn’t crucial in the way that the above records are, but its very helpful when you’re planning and evaluating:
Has the charity succeeded in fundraising for X in the past? Only the once, or pretty much continually? How much has income varied?
How much does income from trusts vary from year to year?
Can I spot key grants that are coming to an end?
If you’ve time, skim the whole site, if there is one. Trusts often aren’t skilled communicators and may put the key piece of information somewhere you don’t expect.
When I see experienced trust fundraisers mess up their research, its generally either because they struggle
Every charity has to send its accounts to the Charity Commission and they appear on the Central Register, as well as some other brief information about the charity. This includes charitable trusts. It’s worth skimming each section of the trust’s entry on the Register, until you get used to what the Register contains.
The register includes details of trusts based in England and Wales. There are similar registers in other countries. For example:
Search for “OSCR” to find the register for Scotland
In Northern Ireland, it’s the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland
If you’re trying to use this site in the USA (it’s really designed for a British audience) the best free starting point might be Guidestar
The main thing in the Register is the accounts.
By the time you read the accounts, they’ll be very out of date. However, it’s often the best information you have and trusts tend to change what they do very slowly. So, you have to rely on the idea that if they were following X policy back then, they are very likely still doing it now. And you’d normally be right.
There are normally three parts to the accounts that are of interest:
1. The narrative at the front of the accounts
Some trusts just send their accounts in because they’re supposed to and don’t make any effort to communicate what they’re really doing. However, others give a more or less detailed account of what they’re doing in the narrative section at the front. (I suspect they’ve realized that applicant charities read the accounts and they’re using them to communicate.)
2. Indications of staffing, under “expenditure” section
If there don’t seem to be any staff – or there’s maybe half a person and lots and lots of grants – then that’s useful to know. Unless the trustees are doing an exceptional amount of work, they may not have time to read very much, or even to consider a proposal from an applicant that they haven’t funded before.
3. Grants lists
Grants lists involve detective work. If you can spare the time, there’s a lot more that you can extract from a grants list than might initially appear the case.
If your job involves pumping out lots of applications for up to say £5k or £10k, there might be a case for keeping your research of grants lists simple. You might just “rinse and repeat” the project you sent the funder last time, or if they are cold, mainly settle on sending out one or two projects that are attractive, then use grants lists to finding trusts that give to your field of work and that seem more open to giving to new charities.
However, you can dig a lot deeper. I will outline techniques to learn a lot more – but do be careful with your time. It’s easy to waste time over-researching trusts, just as it’s easy to do too little for important opportunities.
a. Recognising funders of your overall area of work
You need to be able to recognize the names of charities doing the same kind of work as your charity (youth work, cancer research, fine art, etc). It’s worth looking on Charities Digest, any directory of charities at your local library, Googling charities in grants lists if you’re not sure.
You’ll need to work out what kinds of names are more or less relevant. There will be a pattern, but you can’t always guess it in advance. So, it’s worth looking at your existing donors. I was at a spinal injuries charity and we had a lot more joy with trusts giving specifically to physical disability than trusts giving to disability generally. When I was at a children’s hospice, it seemed to be irrelevant whether the trust had given to hospices for adults. At the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability, funders of the capital works were often be funders of hospitals, but funders of the charitable running costs were funders of disability services.
b. Sizes of grant
How to guess at this:
Focus only on grants for your type of work. Just as you personally probably give more generously to some types of work than others that you support, so do trusts. They can give heavily to one thing and have just a passing interest in another.
Ignore the very biggest grants, especially if they look like an outlier. There may be nothing wrong with asking for the biggest grant, but when you think what the opportunity is worth to you, it’s worth bearing in mind that there may be something very special about that grant, such as a strong personal contact. Personally, I think in terms of a median (middle size) grant.
It’s worth quickly checking for other evidence as to the size: is there any indication the grants vary by size of project, or by size of the recipient charity, for example?
c. Chance of a grant (for a cold trust, based on the grants list)
Suppose the trust hasn’t been tried – or maybe only the once and you’ve got something very different to ask them to fund. Things to consider when guessing the chance of a grant are:
How far the trust varies its giving from year to year. If you compare the lists of grants in one year and the next and find they’ve given the same set of charities both years, then your chances are zero or close to zero. If the lists are totally different, your chances aren’t bad – a complete guess might be in the order of 25% or better?? If the lists have 50% of trusts being refunded, then somewhere in between.
What the trust says about the number of applications it gets. Sometimes this is in the narrative section of the Annual Report, or in a report from an earlier year. You can take account of the number of applications refunded and do a bit of maths to estimate your chances.
d. Looking more closely at what the trust is doing
This can be a bit more work. So, you’ll have to decide whether it’s worth it, given the size of the opportunity.
i. Geographic area
You need to be able to look at your trusts and identify where the trust is giving:
When you look at where the charity is based and its area of operation, this might become:
It looks like there are interests in Essex and Derbyshire. The trust might also be giving to national work, or it might be supporting national charities for their work in Essex/Derbyshire. (If each national charity’s website indicated it was active in essex/Derbyshire, especially if they had a centre there, you’d think the grants were to Essex/Derbyshire.)
Although there’s a grant to Bristol, it’s a bit of an outlier. If this was part of a wider grants list ad there was the odd grant to Bristol, maybe there really is some interest in the city – otherwise, there’s probably not a lot you can make of it.
ii. Specific subject interest
The trust in question might be happy to fund most work with people with learning disabilities, but it’s not unusual for trustees to have more specific interests. To start making a stab at these, you need to know what the charities on the list actually do:
Building that sort of understanding takes work and you’ll have to decide whether to invest the time at all, to invest it up front or to gradually pick it up as you do big applications. The answer probably depends on the demands on your time.
(If you want to be systematic, you can write it out as shown – it will take longer but give you more ideas. If not, you can just try and get a general sense in your head as you go along.)
Once you have that understanding, though, you can start to identify/guess what the trust is funding from the themes that are emerging:
Grants highlighted are where they are the only thing that the charity in question does. As there are a number of charities getting funding that only do social activities, it’s almost certain that that’s an interest. Travel training may well be an interest, as there are a couple of instances. Several charities got funded for day centres, so there may also be something going on there – or it may just be a coincidence.
iii. Kind of funding
Occasionally you can spot something about this. For example, you might spot something that looks like a lot of funding of staff posts, (maybe plus some other costs – or in a few cases here, there might just be two posts funded):
Alternatively, if the amounts are very varied, but usually a lot less than most trust applications, there’s a good chance that the trust is funding a small part of the total cost. In that case, you probably need to factor that in (e.g.: telling them where the other money might come from; trying to find out if they expect you to have a lot of the money already before applying or what)
iv. How much to tell the trust about your service
If there are some big grants in the list and the amounts clearly vary a lot, the chances are that the trust is taking a detailed interest in the applications. So, you’d probably need to tell them more about the project, to reach the minimum level of scrutiny (e.g., four pages including the budget if a reasonable result would be £10k or £20k).
However, if the money is clearly spread around between lots of small grants, typically at the same small amount or a just a couple of amounts, the trust probably takes quick, intuitive decisions. In that case, it makes sense to send them a less detail, to ensure it gets read (maybe just a couple of pages for a grant of a couple of £k.)
You won’t get anywhere without some kind of good list of trusts to start with. The following are the key directories and databases to consider (there are also others):
Funds Online
This is the most expensive option, but the best. It has more trusts than the others and you can order your searches by size.
As with all the databases, the information on it is just a summary of the published information that you can find in the trust’s most up to date accounts and on the website. They also have their own guess as to how to classify the trust’s interests, based on the criteria and most recent grants list. However, that’s the main thing you’ll get from databases and directories: a summary and a bit of light classification, to make the vast amount of information more manageable.
As with the other database search engines, theirs is nothing to write home about but better than nothing.
The summaries are of a decent quality to help you shortlist, but you’ll have to go behind them to really research the trust. There are some example grants, which honesty you can’t rely on, you need to look at the raw data. (If anything, I find them slightly misleading.)
I’ve used Funds Online a lot and the best ways to use it might be:
Getting a very inclusive list of trusts to start and then ordering them by size
A conveniently lengthened summary to digest, to get a sense of whether to approach the trust and basically what they do
It’s then quite convenient to get to the materials for the trust: you can cut and paste the charity number and click through to the trust’s website
My Funding Central
A commercial service, it is available to organisations with an annual income below £1m and is free for organisations under £30k. It has less funders on than Funds Online, but it’s definitely a lot better than nothing.
I’ve used funding databases of the company Idox. In my experience, it has less trusts and less detail, but it’s a perfectly okay product. You can use it the same way as Funds Online.
Idox’s 4Community databases
Councils can contract Idox to provide free access to their database, which you access through a 4community website for that area. I was struggling to find them when writing this page, there may be less around than there were.
If you can get free access to one of the Idox databases, you’ll probably find it has uses. However, if I wanted to rely on free resources, you might also want to consider the Guide to the Major trusts at the library (see below).
Directories
If you go on your Council’s website, you can search the library catalogue and find the directories. There are two main ones. It’s definitely better to have the latest edition, but as the sector doesn’t change that much, you can kind of get by with an old one. (You’ll need to check everything at the Charity Commission and the trust’s web site, but you’d be doing a lot of that, anyway.) You normally can’t take them out of the library and it’s often better if you go with a laptop so you can look at the Charity Commission / the trusts’ websites, as well.
Guide to the Major Trusts Volumes 1 & 2
This is your workhorse directory, if you’re basing yourself on the books. Volume 1 contains a lot more money than Volume 2, but Volume 2 is definitely still worth looking at if you’re a full time professional trust fundraiser.
The Directories basically repeat what’s in the Funds Online database, except Funds Online is nearer to being up to date and you don’t get the (really not that good) search functionality.
As you want to spend your time as efficiently as possible, you may want to search the trusts by order of size, using the list at the front, rather than alphabetically. There’s also a loose classification of the trusts by subject area – that might help give your efforts a little focus, but I definitely wouldn’t rely on it!
Directory of Grant Making Trusts
The quality of detail on each trust is very poor in this book, compared with the Guide to the Major trusts. What it’s good for, though, is the indexes at the front. The book has a lot of trusts and the classification of the trusts – by subject, beneficiary group and areas – is not bad. You may find that you can fill out a list of cold trusts a bit by going through these.