Photos: Jordan Rowland and Simon Hattinga Verschure, on Unsplash
This webpage is for trust fundraisers with three or more years’ experience. Beginners should use this page instead.
What trusts are looking for will differ in terms of the need, the project, the track record of the organisation, the skills and experience of the delivery staff and the outcomes. Even the tone of an adult education proposal for a choir will be a little different from a proposal to fund the choir together because it is therapeutic for the many members who have mental health issues. If you haven’t tailored the proposal in different areas, it may not look like it’s really for that funder.
Trusts and sometimes fundraising trainers will say you should focus only on what you most want and write the work up accordingly. I am not going to tell you that you should sacrifices people’s jobs and much needed services just because the fit is not perfect, any more than I think that many of the biggest projects I have seen would have been submitted or funded if everyone in the charity had been so purist. (In a survey of charities approaching trusts, 66% of applicants agreed that “we often have to manipulate projects to meet grant-makers’ guidelines or restrictions” and only 24% disagreed. (2017) Taking Nothing for Granted Survey, nfpSynergy)
However, I do think you would be a fool to try and take your charity in a substantially different direction – in the words of a former leading trust director, ‘bending too willingly in whatever direction money is blowing.’ (David Carrington, think piece for NCVO, 2009). For example, unless the project has its own weight and momentum, it may struggle to get the internal support at your charity that it needs to thrive. A particular manager might support a small project that is a limited fit with the organisation, but there can be issues if they leave. Also, my experience is that trying to fundraise for projects that do not fit well with the organisation is harder.
This is also another area where you have to be time efficient. Do you go “all in”, or chance a lower-probability, lightly-tweaked application, or do you just forget about the application and move on?
However, when you go from small bids to very large ones, Services will often flex a little bit more. The money’s more valuable to them, therefore it’s worth tailoring things a bit more.
However, if changes are “bolted on” from an internal perspective, I would always have a lot more focus on them when the grant. If it didn’t come from the Services team, there’s a bit more risk it might get de-prioritised.)
Using the funder’s own language and values will bring home the congruence between what they want and what you do.
