How to Find the Right Trust Funders: A Prospect Research Guide
Finding the right trust funders for your charity starts with asking the right questions — before you search a single database. Beth Upton walks through the six questions to ask first, and a curated list of free and low-cost research tools that trust fundraisers actually use.
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.
How Do You Define a Major Gift?
Here at Money Tree Fundraising, one of the most common questions that we get asked is ‘How do you define a major gift?’, with our clients expecting us to state a fixed sum for them. Others come to us with their own pre-determined definitions and there is huge disparity between their answers.
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.
Engaging Major Donors Well: Who, What and How
Major donor fundraising is not as tricky as you might think and it is the one way of fundraising that works regardless of your organisation’s size or cause area and it can be set up on a shoestring budget – as long as it done well. There is no charity that can afford to not consider this area of fundraising.
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.
Trust Fundraising: A £4 Billion Opportunity
In the UK, close to 10,000 charitable trusts grant over £4 billion per year to good causes. Many organisations have found that this can be a reliable and steady stream of income.
Hiring the Right Fundraiser: How to Avoid the Most Common Mistake
The single biggest mistake I see from those recruiting for high value roles is the mistake of choosing the best person of those who came for interview rather than holding out for the person with the right skills, attributes and experience.
Cultivation Events: A 12-Point Checklist for Major Donor Fundraisers
Events will never be the be-all-and-end-all of major donor fundraising. Whilst they can be delightful, fun and a real talking point at home, they are more often than not an expensive distraction.
What Do Your Major Donors Actually Want From You?
In a recent piece of client work we conducted a survey of the charity’s top donors, in order to better understand what they thought about the work of the charity and what interaction they were looking for. When summarising the donor feedback to pass on to the charity, it struck me that there were three identifiable themes.
6 Essentials for a Successful Major Donor Programme
We are often asked what needs to be in place for successful major donor fundraising, to which the answer varies depending on the charity. However, there are 6 generally accepted fundamental factors (I don’t claim to have invented these!), which should act as the core of your major donor programme
Major Donor Fundraising: What Are You Waiting For?
Most charities seem fascinated by the concept of major donor fundraising, yet very few explore it thoroughly or have everything in place to run a major donor programme effectively. This is totally understandable as most charities are small, don’t have the resources and don’t know where to look for potential wealthy benefactors.
How big is big?
Defining a major gift is not about picking a round number — it is about understanding your capacity to invest in individual relationships. Beth Upton explains how to find your organisation's own threshold and what it means for how you segment and manage your donor base.
Delighting your Donor
The secret to delighting major donors is simpler than most fundraisers think — it starts with being honest about how many donor relationships you can genuinely sustain. Beth Upton explains how to find your capacity and then deliver exactly what your donors want.
Is a Development Board a Help or a Hindrance for Major Gift Fundraising?
A Development Board can be a powerful asset for major donor fundraising — but only when the conditions are right. Beth Upton explains the three factors that determine whether a Board will help or hinder your fundraising, and when it is better to say no.