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Andrew de Mille, fundraising consultant for over thirty years, asks
“Are You Getting the Best Response from Your Trust Applications?”
Trust lists should not be treated as mailing lists. Trust fundraising is not just a matter of sending applications to lists of trusts classified as having similar interests. Whilst it can take many hours to draw up “target” lists, and many more hours preparing and polishing applications, this approach seldom generates enough response to meet the charity's needs. Below are some thoughts, based on many years' practical experience, which are intended to give a basis on which to achieve very considerably higher returns on your trust fundraising activity.
Applying to trusts needs to be a two way process, a dialogue with the potential donor leading to the preparation of a very precisely focused application. Alternatively the dialogue can lead to clear advice that you would be wasting your time in applying. There are three main elements of trust fundraising. You can help yourself to better results from Trust fundraising if you follow these simple, old and well proven procedures.
The three elements of trust fundraising are
- The Case for Support – this is your fundraising story, setting out what you want to achieve, who the beneficiaries will be, how their lives (or work / education / care etc) will be improved as a result, how much you need, and what help you are seeking from the particular trust being approached. In projects which have gone through several planning phases earlier figures will differ from later ones. Your figures must be consistent (and add up!) – discrepancies do not inspire confidence. The Case for Support is similar to a business plan, the source document from which all fundraising applications and literature can subsequently be written.
- Researching Potential Trust Donors – it is essential to research very carefully what trusts might be able to support you, and to understand as far as possible from the published material where their interests lie. The information can be found in directories such as the Caritas Top 3000 Charities, the Charity Funding Yearbook, Charity Funding Report and from the trusts' own websites.
- The Means of Approach – it goes without saying that the ultimate means of approach will be a written application in the format required by each trust concerned. But long before you apply to any trusts you should be exploring the networks through which you can seek to open an informal dialogue with Trustees or administrators of each trust on your prospect lists. If this can be achieved informally, on a “pal to pal” basis you are likely to receive very valuable advice on angling and timing your application. This “inside advice” is the key to real success, especially when very large grants are sought.
Most fundraisers fully understand the need for a powerful Case for Support and for extensive research to ensure a well targeted prospect list; it is the third element of the process in which so many trust applications have room for improvement and enhanced results. Intelligent use of the charity's networks of contact, and of the research materials and sources, will help find a route of personal approach to a Trustee. This can reap enormous rewards in terms of defining precisely the right angle of approach to a particular trust.
From the Trust's point of view such dialogue leads to better targeted applications and so saves administrative time; from your charity's point of view this dialogue ensures that the effort put into the application is very precisely targeted using specific advice from the Trust. It is essential that you listen to the advice the Trust gives you, and that you adapt your application to accommodate it if you can reasonably do so without compromising your goals – it is all too easy to keep your own agenda so firmly in your mind that you do not hear theirs.
This approach to building up an application with advice from the trust itself still delivers the greatest returns from trusts and gives your application the best chance of success when it reaches the Trust's grant distribution meeting. It is invariably better to use personal approaches to ten precisely targeted trusts, seeking fairly substantial grants, than to approach one hundred trusts where you have no contact. Some trusts openly agree with this in comments such as – “the Trust only supports projects known to the Trustees”. Others may be more coy on this point, but in practice it is always reassuring to a donor when an influential and respected third party endorses an application.
Make it your business to develop your Charity's networks if you too want to share in the greater rewards available from Trust fundraising.
Andrew de Mille, a partner in Andrew de Mille Fundraising Consultants, has over thirty years experience as a fundraising consultant specialising in major capital projects for which Trusts are one of the most significant sources of funding. He was one of the first members of the Institute of Fundraising, and one of the six founders, a former Chairman and current Board member, of the Association of Fundraising Consultants.
Tel 01628 527753 email andrew@demille.co.uk
This article was first published in Charity Funding Report (CaritasData Limited) in October 2005.