Managing Up: The Internal Conversations That Can Make-or-Break Trust Fundraising
Trust fundraisers are brilliant at navigating external barriers.
The funder who doesn't accept unsolicited applications. The trust with a geographical restriction that barely covers your area. The competitive landscape where the same pot is being chased by more organisations than ever before.
We're used to finding creative ways through, around and over those.
But there's another set of barriers that doesn't get talked about nearly enough. The internal ones. The conversations that happen or don't happen - behind closed doors. The organisational dynamics that quietly shape whether trust fundraising thrives or struggles, regardless of how good the applications are.
These are the conversations I want to explore today.
The impact gap: what funders actually want to measure
One of the most common barriers I see in my consultancy work is the disconnect between what trust fundraisers need and what other departments are measured on.
Operations teams are often targeted on activity. Number of sessions delivered. Number of people seen. Bums on seats. These are legitimate measures of output but they're not what funders are increasingly asking about.
Funders want to know what changes. Not just what happens but what's different because of their grant. The improvement in mental health. The reduction in isolation. The moment someone's life shifts in a meaningful direction.
And yet when a trust fundraiser asks their operations colleagues for impact data - for the stories and statistics that bring a proposal to life - they're sometimes met with blank looks. Not because the impact isn't there. But because nobody has been measuring or recording it in a way that's useful for fundraising.
This is a conversation worth having and having early in the planning stages for any new projects.
Work with your operations team to identify what impact looks like for your beneficiaries. What changes for the people you support? How do you know? What does that look and feel like in a person's life? Getting alignment on this - building impact measurement into how programmes are designed and delivered - makes every future application stronger.
Your website and social media as part of your trust fundraising strategy
Here's something that surprises trust fundraisers when I say it: funders are increasingly doing their own research before they ever receive your application.
They look at your website. They check your social media. They want to see – sometimes before they even read a word of your proposal - whether you're an organisation that knows its impact and talks about it confidently.
And what do they often find?
Posts about upcoming events. Updates about activities. Information about what your organisation does. All of which is valuable but none of which answers the question a funder is really asking: what difference do you make?
Trustees are human beings. They respond to stories. A post that says "last month we supported 24 people through mental health crisis — here's what one of them said about the difference it made" does more for your trust fundraising than ten activity updates.
So, if your organisation's external communications are focused on what you do rather than what changes - that's a conversation worth having with your marketing, communications and PR colleagues. Because your website and social media aren't just public facing tools. They're part of your trust fundraising strategy.
When they're working well, they do half your prospecting work before you've written a single word of a proposal.
How to gather beneficiary stories sensitively
I know what some of you are thinking. We work with vulnerable people. Getting beneficiary stories isn't straightforward. Consent is complicated. People don't always want to share.
And you're absolutely right. For organisations working with vulnerable people, going directly to beneficiaries for stories isn't always possible or appropriate.
But there are other routes.
Stories from the people who care for your beneficiaries - family members, friends, carers - can be just as powerful and often easier to gather. Stories from volunteers who work alongside your beneficiaries bring a different but equally valuable perspective. And sometimes the most moving stories come not from the people you support directly but from the professionals around them - the social workers, the nurses, the teachers who've witnessed the difference your work makes.
The key question to ask across your organisation is: are we having conversations with the people connected to our work about how their stories help unlock funding for others? Because when people understand that sharing their experience - in whatever form feels right for them - directly enables your organisation to help more people like them, the conversation often becomes much easier.
Working with Marketing, Comms and PR
Getting good case studies and impact stories isn't just an operations challenge - it's often a communications one too.
Marketing and comms teams understand the need for impact storytelling. In my experience they're usually willing partners - the challenge is often in the process. How do you get the right stories at the right time? How do you make sure fundraising needs are factored into content planning? How do you build a shared bank of impact stories that everyone across the organisation can draw on?
One thing worth questioning - and this comes up a lot recently - is the rise of staff stories in organisational communications. Posts about team members, their roles, their motivations. These absolutely have their place - they humanise your organisation and celebrate your people.
But do they help funders make decisions about who to support?
In my experience, not as much as beneficiary impact stories do. A funder wants to know about the people whose lives are changed by your work - not just the people who deliver it. A brilliant workforce is something to be proud of. But legacy and impact are what move funders to give.
The target conversation: setting realistic trust fundraising targets
This is perhaps the hardest internal conversation of all but one of the most important.
Trust fundraising takes time. The research, the relationship building, the application, the waiting. A cold pipeline has around a 1 in 10 success rate. Warm relationships improve those odds, but they take months, sometimes years, to build.
And yet trust fundraisers are sometimes measured on outputs. Number of applications submitted. Volume of prospects researched. Activity rather than relationship quality or long-term income growth.
When targets are set without a real understanding of the competitive landscape or when the expectation is that trust fundraising is simply a matter of finding the right funder and filling in a form - it creates pressure that works against the very approach most likely to generate sustainable income.
So how do you have that conversation?
Start with your line manager - unless the buck stops with you!
Have an honest conversation with them and where possible ask for their support in pushing back against the barriers you're facing.
Come prepared. Use your pipeline as a thinking and planning document - not just a financial forecast. If you have a realistic confidence tier with predicted income figures, use it. Show the 1 in 10 cold application success rate alongside what happens when relationships are warm and alignment is strong. Let the data make the case alongside your experience.
Be clear about what you need to do your job well - time for relationship building, realistic targets that reflect the landscape, internal support for impact measurement and storytelling.
These conversations aren't easy. But they're worth having. Because the alternative - carrying the full weight of trust fundraising on your shoulders, fighting internal barriers as well as external ones, trying to build relationships with funders while being measured on the number of applications you submit - is not sustainable.
Getting the whole organisation behind your trust fundraising
The best trust fundraising I've ever seen happens when the whole organisation is behind it.
When operations teams understand why impact measurement matters. When communications colleagues are thinking about fundraising when they plan their content. When senior leaders understand the landscape realistically and set targets that reflect it. When trustees champion the work and open doors where they can.
That doesn't happen by accident. It happens because someone - usually you! - has had the courage to have the conversations that need to be had.
Need the whole organisation behind your trust fundraising?
These internal conversations are hard to have on your own. Money Tree Fundraising helps charities build the alignment that makes trust fundraising work, from impact measurement to realistic, landscape-aware targets. Book a free discovery call and we will talk through where to start.