When is a project “ready” to send an application out?

Photos: Anete Lusina on Pexels and (insert) Matthew Henry on Burst

This are of the site was written for very experienced trust fundraisers.

Factors to balance against each other when deciding when the project is ready

• The expectations of the funder. That’s a research question, as some assessors will be assessing partly on the quality of development of the work, where others will be more interested just in a good idea. However, I’ll discuss possible assumptions below for the (many) times you can’t research this well
• How much “safer” it seems to be to have the project developed further. For example, if you have several trusts that you view as realistic prospects for fundings, then the chance is higher that at least one of them will spot a gap in the development work
• How much time and effort Services are prepared to put in
• How much time and effort you can spare (usually to fill in bits of project development, but occasionally to look deeply into the project, for example by looking at toolkits/good practice guides)
• Trust fundraisers sometimes say, “If we haven’t covered it in the application but it’s necessary, the trust will ask us about it.” I assume they’re looking for an easy opt-out, rather than that they really mean it. Think about your own experience of trusts coming back with questions, as opposed to just rejecting your proposal. How common is it?

In some ways, it’s a maths problem: given how much you need the money, how much time do you have for work on development (before the deadline for submission)? Given that, where do you focus? 

I think that might mean working hard to make something relatively “watertight” because you’re selling it to lots of trusts. Also, it might occasionally mean shoving something out of the door that clearly works as an idea, might stand scrutiny, and everyone’s okay to sort things out if you get the grant – because it was a quick, big, speculative opportunity and there’s nothing lost in doing so.

It’s worth remembering who your target audience is, however. There are big difference between “gift givers”, who make quick, intuitive decisions on the one case, “grant makers” who’ll pick work apart a bit as part of looking for the most impact for their money (but who’d give you a free pass for low-risk things) in a second case and at the far extreme, a professional staff member who’ll spend over an hour assessing your project against a detailed list of criteria.

A few rules of thumb

• The Association of Charitable Foundations assessors’ basic training is based around significant risks to the success of the project. The trainer at the course I attended, Gilly Greene from Comic Relief, said that when she did the same example with trust fundraisers as she did with trust assessors, the fundraisers were more stringent than the grants officers. This accords with the odd comment I’ve had from grants officers that the applications they were given were by trust fundraisers (rather than CEOs, say) were usually well thought through. So, it’s possible to over-develop a project in terms of efficient work.
• Not every key risk will be spotted by the assessor, but occasionally there are other wrong assumptions that simply cannot be left to sort out when you get the money, because they make delivery simply impossible. (For example: the targets are too high, or the resources or opportunities are too limited/ineffectual for delivery to ever be possible, whatever revised strategies are put in place).
• At the same time, I’ve occasionally heard trusts praising “well thought through” projects. So, there are positives to that in terms of selling the work, even if it doesn’t mean you’d be rejected on the grounds of under-development for waiting longer on Services to get things right.
• I’ve occasionally seen projects where the development work hasn’t got to the point of clarifying what the service really is, in broad terms. Is it mainly about high intensity, low volume work, or vice versa? Who are its key target service users? Trusts reject projects for not being clear and I think this is one example: 
  • I once had a project rejected (I felt, grossly unfairly) as “trying to be all things to all people”.
  • Fundraising Everywhere ran simulated grants meetings, with trust fundraisers playing the trustees. One project out of ten was rejected by everyone because they simply didn’t understand it. Maybe that wasn’t just down to poor communication, but because it was actually incoherent/under-developed as a project.
• Trusts often don’t notice as much as we do when we’ve lived with a project for months. They are doing quick work in comparison. (That’s not to say professional grant makers aren’t good at spotting issues, with an intuitive ability to home in on problems from a “generic project management” perspective and maybe some knowledge of work related to yours. It’s just to say that the subtle issue that keeps you awake at night may never occur to them.)
• The standard of development required for innovative work is usually lower. (I say usually, thinking for example of schemes like Reaching Communities, which have often invited innovative projects whilst seemingly assessing to the same high quality of development!)

If after reading the above, you’re still fretting about when to stop the development work, I apologise! I wish there was a clear, definitive answer.