The Funding Network

The Funding Network (TFN) http://www.thefundingnetwork.org.uk is a club for people who donate to charity and to groups that campaign for “social change”.

In London they have a meeting roughly once a month. At each meeting, 4 projects are invited to make presentations, and they typically each raise around £6000 from donations. There’s a selection meeting a month before to choose which projects are going to present. Projects need to be proposed by a sponsor, who has to be a paid-up member of TFN. TFN’s annual membership fee is now £150 a year. TFN takes a fee of 7.5% of the money raised.

Meeting format

A presentation at a Funding Network meeting requires the following:

• A brief (under 1 minute) introduction to the project by the project’s sponsor, who also has to start the donations later in the meeting by pledging a minimum donation of £250.
• A 5-minute spoken presentation, including Powerpoint presentation where required; they have a video projector. The presentation is to a lay audience who you can assume are completely new to the subject. They have a minute for questions afterwards and they are unlikely to ask difficult questions.
• A project description form that is printed out and handed to everybody who attends. This form is also used at the selection meeting as the basis of the charity’s application. There’s an example here so that you can see the headings and have an idea of how one particular charity approached it. The text from Whisper’s jigger appeal on The Big Give could be a starting point.
• There’s a table at the side of the room where you can display brochures and other material

The presentation and project description form both need copywriting skills.

Selection meeting

The number of projects that apply to present at a Funding Network meeting can be anywhere from 5 to 16, of which 4 are selected. Projects can reapply if they are unsuccessful. The selection meeting involves a 1 minute presentation over the phone from each project in turn, followed by about 4 minutes of questions. The questions are generally for clarification of things that aren’t clear from the project description. Key things to watch out for are:

• the project description document (there’s a sample here) is very important and it should be written for a lay audience, not in charity-speak.
• the effects on the beneficiaries should be made very clear. People want to know about outcomes.
• The Funding Network is not particularly keen on applications to fund business as usual, although in practice a lot of the projects, including the one in the sample project description, are business as usual projects. Ideally they would like to see a project that has been shown to have some success in a pilot and that their grant will help to roll out on a larger scale. I think in Whisper’s case, using the grant to combat jiggers in a well-defined geographic region that Whisper hasn’t tackled yet would probably satisfy this criterion.
• The Funding Network meetings need to be somewhat entertaining, to keep people coming, so if they get the impression from the project description and the phone interview that you can present well, that definitely helps. Try not to make it sound like you’re reading from a script over the phone.

At least some of the above ought to be obvious, but it doesn’t seem to be obvious to the charities that apply.