Charitable trusts and foundations

As discussed in the right legal structure, depending on how your campaign has been set up, you may be able to access grant funding from as range of independent trusts and foundations.

Grant-making trusts and foundations are independent bodies (i.e. they are not part of Government or any other statutory body) that provide funding for not-for-profit organisations (while many of these will be charities, you don’t necessarily have to be a charity to get funding).

There are misconceptions that campaigns and pressure groups cannot get funding from grant-making sources. As long as your purposes can be described as charitable (again, even if you are not actually a charity), you may well be able to secure grant funding. To find out how the Charity Commission defines charitable purposes click here.

So, what this means is that, if you are raising money from a grant-making body you will need to emphasise the charitable objectives of your campaign.

Here are just a few of the top tips identified by Mark Lattimer for fundraising from grant-making bodies:

1. If you’re not a charity, identify the parts of your work that can be considered charitable.
2. Identify the trusts and foundations that support this type of work
3. Check whether the funders you have identified are limited to supporting charities. If they are, and you are not a charity, you can still access their funding if a charity or Council for Voluntary Service, will accept the funding on behalf of your campaign.

While it is difficult to generalise about what different funders want, it is certainly often the case that they will only fund project-specific costs (or to put it another way, they don’t want to pay for your ‘core’ and running costs such as computers, stationary, utility costs etc).

There is no magic bullet about how to write a good grant application. Certainly, you will need to be very clear about your vision and key messages with any funder. Beyond that, every funder will have its own objectives and priorities – some are very broad and some are very specific.

Unless you are lucky enough to find a grant maker that is willing to fund all aspects of your campaigning work, including your core costs, you will need to use different funding sources for different aspects of your work e.g. trust funding for your charitable work, individual donations for your core costs, and non-charitable trust funding for your political work.

Non-charitable foundations

While most trusts and foundations are themselves charities, and can therefore only fund work that can be described as charitable, there are a few that aren’t. For some of these funders the reason they chose to forgo charitable status is specifically so that they are able to fund work that isn’t charitable – freeing them up to fund more overtly political, campaigning activity, such as that undertaken by pressure groups.

Mark Lattimer’s ‘The Campaigning Handbook’ identifies three:

The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust

The Barrow Cadbury Fund Ltd

The Network for Social Change