The charitable arm of a professional sports club, running education, employability and wellbeing programmes for young people across its local area. Well known, well run, and short of the one resource fundraising eats: time.
The Starting Point
Capacity, Not Ideas, Was The Bottleneck.
Income was under pressure from several directions at once, and trusts and grants were the clearest near-term lift. But grant income depends on finding the right funders, judging which are worth the effort and writing a strong application for each, and a small team can only do so much of that in a week. Ideas weren't the bottleneck. Capacity was.
What We Did
A Working System On Their Own Pipeline, Before Any Commitment.
- Brought a working system, not a roadmap. The team saw the engine running on their own fundraising pipeline first: real upcoming opportunities, ranked, with a first draft they could pull apart.
- Find, score, draft. A database of registered grant-makers surfaces the opportunities that match the foundation's programmes and locations, scores each by fit and chance of success with the reasoning shown, and writes a first draft from approved programme content and previous successful bids, with an evidence trail on every claim.
- Review and export. The team logs into a portal, edits and exports to Word. Nothing is submitted unless a person on the team decides to submit it.
- Kept the club's relationships safe. Existing sponsors and partners were written into the rules as exclusions, so no suggested approach could clash with a relationship the club already had.
Where It Landed
The First Applications Went To Funders Within Weeks, On A Rhythm The Team Could Keep.
The trial ran on the live pipeline for about ten weeks. Within weeks the first applications built on the engine's drafts had gone to funders, with the decision on each one staying with the team. The bigger change was rhythm: a ranked list arriving on a regular cycle turns grant-finding from an occasional scramble into a routine, and a first draft on the table turns a blank page into an editing job.
This is also where our funder engine grew up. We now run it for a small founding group of charities.
What We'd Tell Another Charity
Rank Before You Write, And Keep A Person On The Submit Button.
- See it on your own pipeline first. A demo on someone else's data proves nothing about your programmes.
- Rank before you write. Most of the wasted effort in grant fundraising is a good application to the wrong funder.
- Keep a person on the submit button. The engine drafts and shows its evidence. The team decides.
- Put your sponsor list in the rules on day one. It's far cheaper than an awkward conversation later.