USING PROFESSIONAL BID WRITERS

At present most not for profit organisations such as charities, community groups, sports clubs and social enterprises are finding that their income has dropped whilst delivery costs and demand have grown. It's vital in this situation that #fundraising activity is as effective as possible as this offers one of the few strategies that can help fill this growing financial void.

Whilst COVID-19 has made the fundraising landscape even more fluid, there is real scope for most not-for-profits to win grant aid. Indeed the UK has over 8,800 charitable Trusts and Foundations who together award between ￡3.2 and 8 billion pounds each year, plus Government, Lottery and corporate funding opportunities. This has always been, and remains a highly a competitive process, all too often organisations either don't try at all or develop bids in house, fail and then give up in the belief it's all too hard.

Not-for-profit organisations are sometimes put off from using an external fundraising specialist due to an incorrect perception that the costs involved will be huge or the workload involved too big. On other occasions, they look for someone prepared to offer a 'no win no fee' arrangement because they are worried about risk.

So having spent a few hours developing some statistics relating to our work over the last two years I want to tackle these concerns head-on.

Time

No doubt preparing strong bids takes a lot of effort, especially if done entirely 'in house'. Using an external specialist can help to reduce this by focusing on what's needed and if required providing additional capacity combined with the experience needed to get the work required done faster.

In most cases, preparing a bid will require a commitment of time and effort from the organisation even if an external specialist is used. One of the ways this can be minimised is by understanding in advance what information funders are likely to need and ensuring as much of this as possible is gathered and kept on file and up to date for when it's needed.

'No Win No Fee'

We don't offer a 'no win no fee' approach because the fee charged has no relationship to the work done and often works out to be very expensive, often sitting at between 10% to 15% of the award value. The main reason for this is that under this system, clients are effectively charged more to cover the cost of any bids a consultant losses. Also, those businesses offering this kind of service typically look to minimise their risk/effort through using 'bid templates' and other approaches that are not always in the client's interest.

We have also found that in many cases, clients have an often misguided belief that fundraising consultants fees on a can be recovered from any grant awarded, and as a result, they don't see the scale of these fees as a big concern as it is 'not their money'. This is worrying for a few reasons:

1. Firstly increasingly funders deem these fees as ineligible costs and thus they must be met outside of any grant made.
2. The addition of these fees even where they are permissible reduces a bids perceived value for money, a key factor most funders consider in the assessment process.

At Heaward Solutions, we are also committed to a highly ethical approach and are members of the Institute of Fundraising and have voluntarily registered with the Fundraising Regulator. Both of these bodies have previously stated that they have concerns about no win no fee arrangments because the fee charged typically has no relation to the work completed.

Instead, our fees are always charged on a 'fixed fee' basis and are payable whatever the outcome. The advantage of this is that our fees are much lower. Since 2017 Heaward Solutions has successfully secured c￡1,000,000 of funding for clients providing an average return on investment of 16:1. When our results are considered as a percentage of the funding secured, our average fee in the last two years works out to be just 6% over half that of some 'No Win No Fee' providers.

Risk

Everyone who makes bids of any kind will fail from time to time, it's simply part of the process as there are steps in the assessment process that are completely outside of the applicant or consultants (see step 3 below) control.

Anyone who states that they can guarantee success is probably not being truthful and should be avoided. A skilled bid writer will without any doubt have a much higher success rate than someone who has never made a bid before or who does so infrequently. At Heaward Solutions, we are pleased to say that we have a success rate of c70-75%.

To find out more or arrange a free initial discovery meeting I can be reached here on LinkedIn or by email at [email protected].