Researching Trusts & Foundations.

The UK has thousands of charitable trusts and foundations, ranging from massive household names like Wellcome Trust and Garfield Weston down to tiny family trusts giving a few thousand pounds a year. Finding the ones aligned with your work is the first challenge.

The best starting points are: the Charity Commission Register (free, searchable, contains every registered charity in England and Wales — including all foundations); 360Giving (a free open data platform showing actual grants made by participating UK funders); funder databases (paid services like the Directory of Social Change's Trust Funding directory); and increasingly AI-powered matching tools like FindMyGrant that aggregate and match across many sources.

Each source has trade-offs. Free sources require more manual work to filter. Paid databases save time but cost money. Matching tools save the most time but require you to have a clear profile of your charity already.

Every credible funder publishes their priorities somewhere — usually on their website, sometimes in their annual report. Read these carefully and literally. If a funder says "we fund work with young people aged 14-25 in the North East," and you work with adults in the South West, they will not fund you regardless of how good your work is.

Three things to extract from any funder's site: what they fund (cause areas, beneficiary groups, types of work), what they don't fund (often listed as exclusions — read these first), and their funding mechanics (amounts, deadlines, application format, geographic eligibility, what type of organisations are eligible).

If you can't find this information clearly on a funder's site, that itself is information. The best funders publish detailed, current guidance because they want good applications. Funders with vague or out-of-date sites tend to be smaller, harder to reach, and lower priority.

Funders often say one thing in their priorities and do something subtly different in practice. The best way to understand what a funder actually funds is to look at their recent grants list — typically published on their website, in their annual report, or via 360Giving.

Read these carefully. Note the size of grants, the types of organisations, the issues being funded, the geographic spread, and any patterns in the kinds of work supported. If you can find a recent grantee whose work resembles yours, you have strong evidence the funder is a fit. If you can't find anything similar in their last two years of grants, you probably aren't a fit — regardless of what their stated priorities say.

This is the single most under-used research technique in the charity sector. Charities that do it have dramatically higher hit rates than those that don't.

The most common mistake small charities make is applying everywhere indiscriminately. This wastes the charity's time, damages your reputation with funders (most funders' programme officers talk to each other and notice patterns), and reduces your team's morale as rejection after rejection comes in.

A useful rule: only apply where you can credibly say "we are exactly the kind of organisation this funder is trying to support." If you have to stretch to fit, don't apply. Save the time for the next funder where you're a genuine match. The hit rate on well-matched applications is dramatically higher than the hit rate on borderline ones — and the time investment per application is roughly the same.

Treat funder research as an ongoing discipline, not a one-off task. Build a simple spreadsheet — or use a charity CRM like Salesforce, Donorfy, or Beacon — listing funders you've identified, their priorities, deadlines, who in your team is leading on them, and outcomes of past applications. Review it quarterly.

Over time you'll build relationships with specific programme officers. These relationships matter — funders fund organisations they know and trust. A short, well-written email to a programme officer asking whether your work is a fit for an upcoming round can save you weeks of wasted effort, and often steers you towards a programme you hadn't considered. The best charities treat funder relationships as long-term partnerships, not one-shot transactions.