Good Grant Fundraising

The subject of trust

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

Do foundations trust us?

A speaker at an Association of Charitable Foundations (ACF) seminar on trust stated that charities need to be:

  • Honest
  • Competent
  • Reliable

The ACF spends probably more time highlighting and trying to develop best practice for trusts, rather than capturing what they actually do. So, I’m not sure that you can jump from a seminar on trust to assuming that trusts are suspicious. However, it’s an interesting starting point.

Charities are very complicated institutions, meaning that evidence needs to be clear and accessible for trusts to see it for what it is and develop more, er – trust.

In a plenary session at the ACF, speakers from different grant-makers, including from the floor, were more concerned about incompetence than dishonesty. (That said, pretty much every interviewee on the What Donors Want podcast talks about the importance of honesty. Trusts have a culture of politeness, perhaps that’s what’s happening.)

If foundations don’t trust something, they will ask for reports and facts (though the fact they’re questioning doesn’t necessarily indicate lack of trust. They might also be asking because your report was badly written).

In this context, it seems relevant that there are clearly foundations that will drop you when you let them down and won’t pick you up again for some time / until it’s clearly shown that you have changed. I can think of trusts in past roles where we had clearly burnt our bridges some years earlier and we just couldn’t go back to where things were before.

I was talking to a consultant with a lot of trusts experience last week about the size of our donor base. He was of the opinion that one reason there were not more was because of a past perception of the charity from years ago.

It would be a mistake, though, to assume this was a universal view. I had a good chat to a grants officer at one large trust about “What if someone at my charity had messed up in earlier times, would you still hold that against us?” He was firmly of the view that it would be very unfair to the charity to hold the actions of one or two people against the rest of the charity in the future.

Do we trust them to trust us? Should we?

A significant minority (one survey, I think by nfpSynergy, found 44%) of charities would not tell their funders if there was a problem. 

As you’ll be aware from other pages on the Reports and the Ethics webpage, I argue strongly that, if you can do it skillfully then telling the funder is nearly always better, as well as being your duty because of the Fundraising Code of Practice. Showing you can be trusted is an important currency.

Grants Officer Edgar Villnueva is firmly of the view that, yes, people do get punished by withdrawal of future support as a result of their disclosures of messing up. He didn’t discuss the issues I raised about presentation, his was a slightly throwaway point he was making to illustrate a wider issue.

What IS trust, anyway?

Brenee Brown suggests the following seven elements of trust. The following is a bit divorced from what we do, but worth considering:

  • Boundaries: You respect my boundaries, and when you’re not clear about what’s okay and not okay, you ask. You’re willing to say no. 
  • Reliability: You do what you say you’ll do. At work, this means staying aware of your competencies and limitations so you don’t over promise and are able to deliver on commitments and balance competing priorities. 
  • Accountability: You own your mistakes, apologize, and make amends. 
  • Vault: You don’t share information or experiences that are not yours to share. I need to know that my confidences are kept, and that you’re not sharing with me any information about other people that should be confidential. 
  • Integrity: You choose courage over comfort. You choose what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy. And you choose to practice your values rather than simply professing them. 
  • Non Judgment: I can ask for what I need, and you can ask for what you need. We can talk about how we feel without judgment. 
  • Generosity: You extend the most generous interpretation possible to the intentions, words, and actions of others.

This is quite a holistic list. It reminds me of Aristotle’s discussions of trust with regard to rhetoric. He says that if you want to influence someone, they need to trust you. However, to show you are trustworthy means a lot more than just showing you are honest. It covers a range of characteristics – or in this case, the characteristics of your charity – which mean they can put weight on what you say and expectations about what you’ll do.