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The material in this area of the site is currently for people with at least three years’ trust fundraising experience.
Using toolkits
There are a number of starting points in finding useful resources. Suppose for example you were putting together a community arts project for people with mental health issues:
- Try Googling ‘community arts toolkit’, ‘community arts how to’, ‘community arts good practice’
- Try Googling ‘community arts evaluation mental health’
- If you can’t find the actual items online, you can often do so at the British Library
- There are specialist What Works Centres for: ageing well; homelessness; policing; early intervention; education; NICE (health); higher education; Wales; children’s social care; wellbeing (which might be useful in this example); youth work; and local economic growth. These have practice libraries
- New Philanthropy Capital has some interesting guides, specifically designed for funders, regarding good practice in different areas (in this case, the materials on mental health outcomes might be interesting.)
How to use them:
- Carefully. If you start saying things to staff who are somewhat uncertain about the issue, you can undermine their confidence and they can start relying on what you say, even though you know less, overall, than they do. However, in many cases they don’t read what you’ve found because it doesn’t suit their way of working.
- You have to encourage, also pick your issues. If you ask too difficult a question, you can cause paralysis (despite the fact that the project was going to be perfectly good, if not brilliant, without digging into the big issues).
- Once you’ve established how the project does relate to the literature, you can start using it in proposals to sell the work as best practice.