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This webpage is for trust fundraisers with three or more years’ experience. Beginners should use this page instead.
The Need section
How important is research evidence?
In a September 2022 panel of the Head of Grants at St James’ Place and Zurich, plus fundraising consultant Colin McLennan, the view was that you only needed to put research evidence in applications for six figure sums, or statutory applications, not for, say, £10-30k. I’d add to that: if what you say sounds dubious to a moderately informed layperson (i.e., most assessors) then it’s best to back it up in some way, which could include research.
Evidence is a key issue to consider. A lot of proposals I have read as a trust assessor had just one stat in them – how many people in the geographic area were homeless / refugees / whatever – and they did okay in assessment. However, some trusts do expect strong objective evidence, including better stats. (As of 2020, the “one fact, then our opinions” approach would be rejected out of hand by the Reaching Communities grants scheme, for example.)
Strong evidence can look good. To quote from a (thorough and technical) grants scheme: ‘If that evidence is presented clearly then making that decision becomes much easier. This is especially important when decisions are made by consensus during a three-hour panel meeting. You want to feel confident in that meeting. And the most important criterion you want to feel confident about is whether the applications you assessed show that the applicant understands the problem to be solved.’
In the real world, though, most service managers haven’t gained most of their expertise through reading vaguely relevant research reports. At the charities that leant heavily on research, it has usually been one or a few reports. So if you think your funder will know that, it’s perhaps slightly odd to present a lot of evidence that has probably been collected by the trust fundraiser as the need that the project addresses? (I’m not saying that no trust are looking for this – just that, in the real world, it’s odd.) Stronger evidence might be from internal records.
If research evidence is clearly required by the funder, then clearly you have to give it. Otherwise, I’d say the key determinant whether evidence is needed or not would come from the theory of rhetoric: will you be trusted to make the point, or does it need more substantiation? Evidence (and especially, numbers) particularly help for the things that might be questioned. It doesn’t add much to your proposal to find research evidence that supports the claim “over 90% of people with a spinal cord injury use a wheelchair”. Everyone would expect the situation to be something like that, anyway. HOWEVER, it could be worth saying how many people with a spinal cord injury are on out of work benefits, if poverty is an important consideration, because it (a) makes you look like you know what you’re on about and (b) if the figure is exceptionally high, having the research would add real clout.
(Btw – I don’t believe it’s appropriate to use research to try and get dubious, off-the-wall ideas into the proposal, though it’s certainly something that a good reading of the research would sometimes let you do. As the great scholar of rhetoric, Corbett, argues, you rely on an image of honesty, good attitudes and a wise, practical approach. It just needs one completely inappropriate, shifty-looking, comment to discredit you.)
Another benefit of reading a lot of research is that it helps you to develop your own understanding of the service users. It’s not unusual to be in a job where you don’t have much direct access to service users and sometimes the Services staff won’t make the time or (occasionally) don’t want to say what they think service users’ lives are really like. (I do understand why they might be wary about talking about service users’ actual lives and needs, because, with a lot of causes, who really 100% knows what happens when the service user is at home, away from the service? However, we all know that if you can’t describe what’s wrong in the service users’ lives before your charity’s intervention, then you can’t apply effectively for the funding!) When Services won’t take the lead in trying to describe the need for the service, using reports means you can take the initiative, yourself. You can put down some text about service users’ lives, that’s based on your reading and that you think is very likely true. You can then send it to the Service Manager to check – which usually forces them to get down off the fence.
Another benefit to research is that, the more you know, the better you write. Over the years, you’ll find you build a much deeper understanding of people’s lives and problems and so you can better describe the issues in a wider range of issues, as well as asking the service manager whether other issues, that they haven’t mentioned, are important.
Where do I find research, then?
Useful sources include: data collected by statutories, research reports, careful internal records of need.
There are three ways to come at this:
1. Use an AI to suggest sources.
- At the time of writing (August 2023) only Bing had an AI connected to the internet – and Bing’s a rubbish search engine for precise searches.
- If you have ChatGPT 4, you can also get the WebGPT plugin that cam be used to effectively make ChatGPT search the internet. It’s slow and not amazing, though.
- Claude 2 was more up to date than ChatGPT or Bard about what was on the internet than other sources were. It was also perhaps more forthcoming about data sources.
Perhaps the best idea is to plug your question into all the main AIs and compare results.
2. Googling
I use Google Scholar if the research I’m looking for is likely to be in a peer reviewed academic paper, or Google if not.
If you live in London, there’s no need to pay a fortune accessing papers from journals. Join the British Library. You can see the vast majority on their computers, or sometimes you’ll need to order them (which takes 48 hours). the British Library Readers Rooms are also brilliant places to get your head down for a solid, undisturbed day’s work.
3. Charities Excellence Framework Data Finder tool
This takes a bit of time to search, but it’s a way into a lot of things, from very superficial “I just want a vaguely relevant factoid” research to precise geographic data for your locality: https://www.charityexcellence.co.uk/Home/BlogDetail?Link=Charity_Data_Finder
Writing the Need section powerfully
I’ve said a huge amount about powerful writing on other pages. These general points should be directly applicable in the Need section.
Structuring the section
There are lots of good ways to do this. However, it can particularly work to arrange the material starting “big picture” (what’s going on in someone’s life) then get to the thing the intervention works on (e.g., their lack of knowledge) then the gap in service that your work fills. Each should appear to rest securely on the previous point: if it looks like adding the service wouldn’t deal with the life issue described, you’ve either defined the wrong problem or got the wrong solution.
I have heard a couple of trust fundraising trainers argue that a bid should build steadily to a clear point, so that the last thing you could quite naturally write would be “So, please make the grant”. Structuring the Need section in this way helps it to build.
However, there may be more important priorities, e.g., with big bids having clear through lines can mean following a common structure in the different boxes on the form.
Feature an early surprise
Moving away from things that enable you to describe the best need: you want to develop interest early in the proposal and a little trick to encourage that is to say something unexpected but significant about the need. Rob Woods has produced some great stuff for us, this is a quote from his quite good free book, Power through the Pandemic:
In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath talk about how human beings have internal ‘guessing machines’ that unconsciously predict what you are about to say. So if we only say things that the supporter already knew, we rarely hold their interest for long. One simple, powerful way to overcome this tendency is to deliberately say something that is not immediately obvious. It does not need to be astonishing. Just an angle that may not have been top of mind until you mentioned it.
Resources
Alicia Gainger has a very good blog post entitled ‘10 ways to build your case for support’. It’s mainly about gathering and presenting evidence related to the Need section in proposals.