What is a charitable trust, and how do trusts decide who to fund?
What a charitable trust is, where its money comes from, how trustees decide who to fund, and what has changed for charities asking them.
How to find the right trust funders, and how to approach them
How to find trust funders that fit your charity, with free tools to search and a guide to making first contact.
The Executive Summary: The Part of Your Trust Proposal That Does the Heavy Lifting
The executive summary is often treated as an introduction. In practice, it is the part of your proposal that a funder reads most carefully, and sometimes the only part they read at all. Get five specific things right, in the right order, and your proposal stands a much stronger chance of getting the attention it deserves.
Why Good Trust Applications Still Fail, and What to Do About It
Most trust applications that fail aren't bad ones. They're good applications with fixable problems. Stacey Teece unpacks the most common patterns she sees — from describing activities instead of impact to sending applications in volume rather than with precision — and explains what small adjustments actually move the needle.
Your Trust Pipeline Is Trying to Tell You Something. Are You Listening?
Your trust pipeline is more than a tracker of money in and money out. Stacey Teece explains how to read it as a map of your funder relationships — and what to do when it reveals that something needs to change.
Good news on Trust funding — but is it the whole story?
Positive headlines about trust funding growth are welcome — but they can mask very different realities for individual fundraisers. Stacey Teece looks at what the data actually means for your cause area, and why digging deeper into the numbers matters.
Project Design for Trust Fundraising: What Makes a Fundable Project
As trust fundraisers, we rarely have control over the design or delivery of the projects/services for which we are raising necessary income. Nevertheless, we still need to gather as much information as we can to complete our proposals and applications so they make sense and are an inviting opportunity for funders in which to invest.
Trust Fundraising Under Pressure
Emergency trust fundraising is rarely ideal — but sometimes unavoidable. Beth Upton explains how to act quickly and effectively when urgency strikes, and more importantly, how to build a sustainable trust pipeline that prevents the crisis from recurring.
How to Write a Grant Application: The 10 Essentials
The thing is, the ‘perfect’ grant application isn’t an easy recipe. At any point a myriad of elements – guidelines, project design, deadlines and budgets – can alter your plans the same way a missing ingredient can affect your baking.
Trust Fundraising Myths Debunked
We speak to charities every day about fundraising from trusts & foundations. There are some key themes that emerge time and again – misunderstandings about grant-makers, their purpose, their requirements – and we want to set the record straight by airing these trust fundraising myths and explaining the truth instead.
High Value Fundraising: Are You Making the Most of It?
Our CEO Beth Upton has worked in fundraising since 2002 and is regularly frustrated by the income opportunities not being taken advantage of by charities, large and small.