The organisation

Photos: Anna Shvets on Pexels and (insert) Brodie Vissers on Burst

This webpage is for trust fundraisers with three or more years’ experience. Beginners should use this page instead.

This is the single worst written section in many proposals, because it often (1) adds nothing to your argument to fund the work and (2) actually distracts from it for that section. Sometimes as a reader, I find myself actually searching the text, to see if it in some way offers clues as to whether this is a fundable proposal.

It might be a defensible thing to write. You can see why: people have cut and pasted a generic organisational description (often very well crafted by the Communications team) into the middle of the application, for speed. You may be needing to save time. You can definitely do it: it’s such common practice, it looks professional.

Writing a genuinely strong organisation section

When you are filling in a form instead, the corresponding question you’d answer would be: “Why do you think your organisation is well placed to deliver this project?” You’ll need a few lines that give the reader a quick picture of who you are – a £5m regional employability charity delivering a variety of services to hundreds of disabled people a year; a £15m charitable NGO that improves supplies and sanitation water across disadvantaged communities in Asia and Latin America. Some funders won’t be interested unless you’re well established, so year you were founded is worth slipping in. The trust will want that level of orientation and anyway, everyone does it so maybe it would look odd not to. However, after that, a good organisation description supports you in persuading the trust to fund your project. Awards or similar things that might make you look special/exceptional are also nice.

Sometimes dropping in the reason the organisation was founded can highlight where you come from and do so in a “storified” (i.e., more memorable way, that connects more). At the same time, sometimes these foundation stories do waffle on, using a tonne of the word count saying something that’s already pretty obvious. So you need to be a bit careful and remember the difference in interest level if you’re within the charity or if you’re the trust assessor.

There’s a case for adapting a concept from marketing, of “core competencies”. (This is normally used for something slightly different.) Core competencies are the central things about your charity that distinguish it. A core competency has to satisfy three criteria:

• Relevance, here relevance to the trust

• Difficulty of imitation – you could maybe substitute “uniqueness” here and use the USP form in the relevant section on General Proposal Writing points. However, difficulty of imitation also conveys something important about where the charity is. For example, when I was at Age Concern, we were both truly local and truly national. We had 350 enterprising member organisations, in a common federation and sharing common values and high standards, but each networked into and working to the specifics of their local communities. When I say that, I’m not only describing something unique, but something set apart.

• Breadth of application: this is the least directly applicable element of “core competency”, it would be interesting if the competency you describe not merely covered a lot of the work of the charity, but also enabled a lot to happen, because it was so powerful in itself. To take the previous example of Age Concern, you can immediately start mentally making up your own projects that could be started and easily adopted in that federal set-up. Likewise at my current charity, the minute you go into the charity being peer-led, the informed mind would immediately start spinning off so many positive ideas about it.  

If you write this part last, it will be clearer what else to cover, which will be in the areas of:

• How has the charity delivered projects very like this one before? 
• What has the charity done before that shows it has the skills to deliver the kind of work in the proposal?
• What has it done that shows it has the skills to work with the same kinds of service users?
• Anything else that makes the organisation itself well set up to deliver the work. For example: 
  • If there’s anything about your senior management that is uniquely important in the project (e.g., they’re mostly service users, for a peer-led project).
  • Having access to service users: employment projects may struggle to get service users or rehabilitation projects may struggle to get into hospitals – so, showing you’re working with lots of them is worth mentioning.
  • Being able to refer on where this is critical – e.g., for youth work or frontline drug or homelessness organisations, you could reference your close partnerships with key referrals agencies due to, e.g., length of time

In a shorter proposal, you might or might not say something about the credentials of the line management on the project, but this would generally go in the project description.