How to increase your income from Trusts and Foundations
The cost of living crisis means it's getting more challenging to raise as much income as your charity needs from your supporter base. This is a great time to be looking to maximise your grant income from trusts and foundations.
But it can be hard work. If you're not well-practised in writing grant applications, each one can take a long time and then yield nothing. Get it right though, and you can be rewarded with game-changing funding for your projects.
Here are our top tips:
Create a compelling case for support and use that as the basis for all of your applications. You need to be really specific about your needs. Include an overview of your charity, impact stories and statistics from the past year. Then get together fine detail on the project you want funding for, and a detailed budget showing how the grant will contribute to the costs.
Research Trusts and Foundations that might support your work. You can waste a lot of time contacting trusts who don't fund your sort of work or your type of charity. Find the right ones through networking, researching online databases like Funds Online, or by tracking down the List of Grant Making Trusts in your local library.
Schedule your applications over the whole year to make sure you don’t miss any deadlines.
Record the results and send thank you letters and updates at the specified times.
Build relationships with your funders by keeping in touch regularly, answering any questions promptly, and offering to meet in person.
For a small charity, this can be quite a technical and time-consuming job. If you need extra support, Better Story has a Trusts and Foundations Service to take all of this and more off your hands, and we even offer a money back guarantee on our fee! Find out more here and get in touch.