Good Grant Fundraising

What is a trust?

Photo: Marcus Aurelius

This webpage is for beginners. If you have at least three years’ experience, use this page instead.

Table of contents

Family/private trusts

The large majority of application you make across your career will probably be to these kinds of trusts. If you don’t know what type of trust you’re dealing with: 95% of the time, its a family/private trust.

Trustees are typically a handful of people, normally from more privileged/professional (e.g., solicitors/businesspeople) backgrounds, mainly men and mainly in their 60s or older. They’ve learnt something about the charity sector from assessing a lot of applications, but they’re still just doing this as a hobby. Market research I saw years ago suggested that the most widely read newspaper of “major donor” types – a similar group – was the Daily Telegraph.

So, when you’re communicating with such people, you need to be able to step out of the internal “group think” at your charity in terms of values, how things will be seen, the jargon you use. If you know people from that kind of background, it’s worth discussing your work with them and trying to draw out how they see your field of work. If you can learn how to talk to them: that’s a good way to talk to most trusts.

So for example, if you work for a drug and alcohol charity, say, the chances are you’ll come across some prejudiced views. At the same time, though, it is a broad and ideosyncratic sector – so, there will also be people who completely “get” it.

When you pick up the phone to a family/private trust, mostly you’ll be speaking to someone at a firm of solicitors but sometimes they’ll be a grants officer or an administrator at the trust. As well as fielding calls, what their role at the trust is will be:

  • They may well screen out ineligible applications. (So, calling them about eligibility is a great idea.)

  • They may write summaries of the work to present to the Trustees. (It’s not a bad idea to ask them about this and then write your own summary in the cover note with the application, which they might use.)

  • If they’re a grants officer (which happens at a proportion of the very big family trusts) they’ll assess your application and may make a recommendation about funding. (So, it’s a good idea to be impressive in such calls!)

“Institutional” trusts

If a small group of “hobbyist” professionals constituted one end of the spectrum, the big-ish institutional funders you sometimes get would be at the other. Examples might be: Comic Relief, Children In Need, the National Lottery Community Fund. Though much fewer in number, they can make up a good amount of the total you actually raise, because they are so big. So, you definitely have to understand them, too.

These big institutions usually have more focus on good practice. That has lots of consequences:

  • Trustees often have more understanding of the charity sector.

  • The staff are often drawn from the charity sector and see themselves as trained grants professionals, with a lot of assessment skills. You may still rarely get an assessor who properly understands your work, but very occasionally you’ll also get one who knows more than you do. However, they’ll be familiar with the kinds of issues that happen at charities.

  • They’re more likely to want to provide good “customer service” to you – so, you can assume they’ll give you a bit more time on the phone and try and answer your questions or give you advice if they reasonably can (rather than just doing so because they’re being generous – which is more normal with family foundations).

  • They normally want to look into your proposal in more depth. So, you could easily end up writing 25-50% more (or 100% more, occasionally) for the same size of grant, because they need a better understanding of what you’re doing.

I’ve drawn a clear dividing line between private, or family, trusts on the one hand and these more institutional funder son the other. However, it’s more of a spectrum and you’ll see very big family trusts, for example, that have characteristics of both.

Corporate trusts

When complete outsiders think of trusts, they normally start talking about companies. Companies do sometimes have charitable trusts – these are a small part of the trusts “sector” but sometimes important. Their unique characteristics are:

  • Sometimes they behave very like trusts generally, but sometimes they are so interwoven into the company’s strategy for community involvement that you’d barely think of them as a trust at all, they’re just where the company gets the money from to do something else. (Corporate fundraising is “off topic” for this website, you’ll have to look elsewhere for advice.)

  • The applications tend to require less project detail – so if there’s no guidance about which way to jump, you might want to be more brief.

  • They can look a bit institutional, with detailed forms and maybe criteria, but whether they feel the same obligations to be helpful and fair that you get in big institutions will vary.

  • Contrary to what you may read elsewhere, in the UK, the company may prefer applications giving a degree of recognition (even though the money comes from a charitable source). There are things you can’t do because of the amount of benefit the company gets – such as including a logo – but you absolutely can say that you’d thank them publicly and offer to do a press release about the gift.

Community Foundations

Community foundations exist to provide a mechanism for professional grant-making, usually for relatively small grants, into the local community. In many ways they’re like the big institutional grant-makers in terms of their paperwork, procedures, professional grants staff, emphasis on fairness and helpfulness, etc. However, the money they give is much more limited.

  • Community foundations are complicated from the outside, but it’s usually easy to have a good phone conversation with the foundation.

  • They tend to know a lot of the local charities. So for example, if your project treads on the toes of another local charity, they may know.

  • You do a lot of work to apply and report on a relatively small grant.

  • I’ve come across community foundations that give to charities that haven’t yet registered with the Charity Commission – something that’s more rare amongst trusts.

If it’s worth spending the time on applying to a community foundation for your project (and it is quite a bit of work) I’d do them as one of the earlier applications. That’s because it can help you get “your ducks in a row” for the rest of the your bids. You can have a good conversation, they’ll make you think and by the time you’ve finished that proposal, you’ll be ready for most things. However, because it’s not for that much money (typically not more than £5k) it’s a relatively “safe” way to get up to speed.