Photos: Etty Fidele and (insert) KOBU Agency, on Unsplash
The material on this page is for beginners. If you have three or more years’ experience of trust fundraising, the following page was written more for you: https://goodgrantfundraising.org.uk/ensuring-clarity-in-trust-fundraising/.
Clarity in your writing matters with Trusts. Back in the 1990s there were a few surveys of trusts asking for reasons for rejections. Something that came up was: “lack of clarity”. If you think about it, that’s actually a pretty ambiguous (unclear!) phrase. However, I know assessors who would reject just because your project description is unclear and therefore confusing. If the description is unclear, they’d say, how do we know they can communicate to manage the work? How do we know they’ll be able to update us?
Secondly and being less extreme: when I’ve read a genuinely unclear application, it’s been annoying to me as an assessor trying to work out what’s going on, so I can assess it. You don’t want to annoy the assessor.
Thirdly, the projects that “sell” most strongly to the funder read as common-sense-ically good ideas. You’d like the assessor to really get in their guts that this is an important place to put the money and that won’t happen if they’re unclear what you’re actually on about. You also need to paint clear pictures that the assessor will empathise with – if they can’t empathise in some sense (which means they can relate) they may not care.
Making it concrete and tangible early on can make it easier to understand. Who, what they do, where and when/how often. As an assessor, when the applicant seemed to be becoming confusing or waffling on without getting the point, I’d always go to the budget to see what the project actually was. You probably make the application much easier to follow if you tell the reader early on, “A co-ordinator will deliver expert advice and recruit and manage six volunteer mentors” than if you say that near the end.
When I’ve had to review people’s writing as a Trusts Team Manager, the single most common reason why people’s writing was seriously unclear wasn’t to do with the things people normally train you about (active and passive verbs, George Orwell’s Six Rules of Writing, etc). It was because the underlying structure of the writing was poor. You may recall that from writing essays – it’s the same, here.
One cause is because there’s a lot of, often interdependent, ideas and facts to marshal together to make the case. A second cause is that, most people have a lot of ideas about what to say as they write – and in that’s so, it’s not surprising if the points don’t all support each other well.
When you’re learning to write proposals, it’s a good idea to dump down everything what you want to say in note form before you write it, then structure your notes. What you’re looking for is:
Logical flow
A bit of “signposting” if it’s a long document, where people are reminded what you’re on about
Everything is where you’d expect to find it
Thinking about structure doesn’t just help with clarity. It also helps you control how the points are is handled in the proposal – so that you can, for example, hit the reader with things that get them reading and finish with more punch.
Short sentences are easier to read. Get rid of superfluous “ands” and subordinate clauses.
Annoyingly, I’ve never once managed to employ an entry level trust fundraiser who has recently done a Masters degree or PhD. They look great on paper, but then when you read their efforts to write, they miles away from being able to write in a natural, straightforward way – so, they immediately put themselves behind other candidates.
Assessing trust applications is an extremely tiring process. You have so much to look out for, after a while it’s easy to end up in a “brain fuggy” state, where you’re only ¾ aware of what you’re reading. When you struggle to read the prose, never mind understand the project, I’ve found it an annoying distraction.
My suggestion: Find somewhere private and try reading your application aloud. You’ll soon spot if bits are convoluted, gobbledy-gooky or don’t actually mean anything. I do this all the time and it’s my secret weapon. It’s even better if you can leave the text until the day after, so you see it afresh.
It’s especially important when you are writing great screeds of text, when it becomes easy to get tired and stop thinking about the reader. Every time I’ve written a long proposal and then come back and read it aloud the day after, I’ve always made significant changes to increase clarity. That’s after more than 25 years’ practice at writing proposals.
Get rid of all the jargon. You can use buzz words, but only when they fit the context and it’s obvious what they mean. Some people think that using clever words makes you sound impressive. Actually it’s the reverse: in research, university students rated the authors as more intelligent whose essays were able to explain everything with simple, clear words, rather than obscure, overcomplicated lexicography.
Cutting and pasting can be attractive, because it can save time and use carefully crafted wording. However, the text you are using was normally written for a very specific context. There can be all sorts of subtle assumptions and signposts to other ideas in the wording as it is. Just lifting it and plonking it somewhere else may accidentally confuse, even if the text “basically says the right thing”. The way the mind works, you might not notice this from a quick glance.
When you cut and paste, you need to carefully re-read it and tweak it, so that it really does fit properly into the new context.
Personally, I like to hit people with my main point at the start of the paragraph. (Giving people the main idea makes it a bit easier to digest. Also, it’s easier to get the points if the reader is just skimming.)
If I can get the key point in the section into the first sentence of the section, even better!
Having the key point in the same place is mentally easier to digest. The mind knows what’s coming up and the eye knows where to go.
ChatGPT is great at rewriting individual sentences / small groups of sentences to make them much clearer. It may not yet be at the stage of being able to write full proposals, but it’s great for inspiration in situations like this.