Trust fundraising prospect research: how to find out who funds charities like yours

Prospect research is how a trust fundraiser turns tens of thousands of UK grant-making trusts into a short list that fits: funders that have given to organisations like yours, at the size you need, where you work, and that will read an application. It runs on free public records and decides the success rate before anything is written.

Why research decides the result

Trusts decline most applications, and most declines are for fit rather than quality: the wrong legal form, the wrong county, an amount outside the range, a cause the trustees do not fund, or a trust that does not read unsolicited requests at all. NCVO's guidance on understanding a grant fund says that if your organisation fails a funder's factual criteria of income, location or legal status, do not apply, and that where a funder has no record of funding organisations like yours "it won't usually be a good use of time for you to apply". Every one of those declines is avoidable with public information, which is what prospect research reads.

The numbers show the scale. OpenGrant lists more than 49,000 registered UK charities whose register entries say they make grants to organisations. On 26 October 2026 it listed 1,035 open, rolling and forthcoming schemes, 407 of them for charities and community groups, from 142 funders. GrantNav held 1,565,468 published grants from 355 funders. No fundraiser can read all of that; the method below reads the right fraction.

What a grant-making trust is

A grant-making trust is a charity whose purpose is to give money to other organisations rather than to run services. The register entry records that it "makes grants to organisations". Beyond that the group is varied: endowed foundations with staff, programmes and portals; company and family trusts that meet twice a year; local trusts restricted to one town; trusts that fund only a settled list. The useful division is by how they receive applications. Programme funders publish criteria and forms. Letter funders have no programme but consider requests. Invitation funders approach organisations themselves. Closed funders take no new applicants. What is a grant-making trust and how do you approach one describes each kind and the route it expects.

Three large trusts show the range on 26 October 2026. Garfield Weston Foundation, with 18,799 published grants worth £824 million, accepts applications all year round. Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, with 7,345 grants worth £787 million, accepts expressions of interest on a rolling basis, with a £30,000 minimum grant and a £100,000 minimum turnover. The Tudor Trust, with 3,674 grants worth £169 million, says it has no traditional written application process and invites organisations after conversations and its own research.

Step one: define what you are looking for

Research without a specification finds everything and qualifies nothing. Before opening a register, write down five things: your legal form and charity number or company number; your income band from the latest accounts; the places you work, as local authorities and regions; your cause in the words the Charity Commission uses to classify charities (education, health, poverty, community development and so on); and the amounts you need, split into projects, core funding and smaller items. NCVO's advice is to search "when you know exactly what you want to fund".

That specification is also what funders see when they look you up, so it should match your register entry. A charity whose register entry says it works in one county will not persuade a trust restricted to another, however the application is written.

Step two: find who funds organisations like yours

The fastest route to a shortlist is to read what funders have given to organisations like yours. Three sources carry that record.

Published grants. 360Giving is the UK charity that helps funders publish their grants as open data in one format, and GrantNav is its free search tool. Search by keyword, region and amount, and the funders tab shows who gives most often to work like yours. Look up three or four peer charities as recipients and their funder lists appear. Download any result as a spreadsheet. How to use 360Giving data to find funders sets out the four searches and the cautions.

Peers' accounts. For the funders that do not publish, which includes most small trusts, your peers' accounts on the charity register are the record. The notes itemise grants received and the trustees' report thanks funders. How to find out who funds a charity explains where to look and how to merge the lists.

The reverse search. OpenGrant's peers lookup takes your charity number, finds organisations with similar registered purposes and lists the publishing funders that have given to them, each linked to a funder page. It cannot see funders that do not publish, so it complements the accounts.

Funders that appear for two or more peers are your strongest prospects. Funders that appear once may owe the grant to a connection you lack.

Step three: read what each funder really gives

A funder's stated range is written to be wide. Its grants list is the truth. For funders that publish, OpenGrant's funder page shows the total published, a typical award calculated as the median of the 100 most recent grants, and the share of those grants that went to registered charities, unregistered groups or companies, with the GrantNav link beside them. Esmée Fairbairn's median was £15,000 on 26 October 2026 against its stated £30,000 minimum, because older grants are in the sample; Trust for London's was £7,500; City Bridge Foundation's £50,000. Never infer a typical award from a stated maximum.

For funders that do not publish, the accounts carry the same information in the grants note and the trustees' report, which also states the grant-making policy, the meeting cycle and often whether applications are considered. Charities with income over £25,000 must file their report and accounts within 10 months of their year end, so the record is never more than 22 months old. How to read a grant-making trust's accounts and annual return is a fifteen-minute routine for the whole document.

Step four: establish the route

The last qualification question is whether the funder will read an application from you, and by what route. The website answers it for most funders with a site: a programme page means open, a sentence declining unsolicited applications means invitation only. The trustees' report answers it for the rest. The grants list is the check: new recipients each year mean applications get through. OpenGrant's funder pages answer "does this funder accept unsolicited applications?" for every funder with a live scheme in its sources, and its rolling deadlines page lists the 142 schemes that accepted applications at any time on 26 October 2026. Which UK trusts accept unsolicited applications, and how to tell sets out the signals and what to do when the answer is no.

The route also sets the form. Programme funders want their form, in their window. Letter funders want two pages and the accounts, timed for the trustees' meeting. First-stage funders want an expression of interest that states the work, the amount and the fit in its first lines. Invitation funders want an introduction or nothing.

Step five: build the pipeline

A pipeline is the shortlist with stages, dates and arithmetic. Five stages work for most charities: identified, qualified, approached, submitted and decided, each move dated. The size comes from published success rates: the National Lottery Community Fund funds around one in three Awards for All applications, Esmée Fairbairn reported 5% of expressions of interest leading to a grant in 2025, and community foundations sit between. A rule that works is three pounds of applications for every pound needed from small funders and ten for every pound from large trusts.

The calendar comes from published decision times, built backwards from the date the money is needed: 16 weeks for Awards for All England, 40 weeks for Reaching Communities England, two months to shortlist and three to four months to decide at Trust for London, six to eight months in total at Esmée Fairbairn. Rolling programmes remove the deadline, not the wait, so every prospect gets a target month. Rounds are listed by closing month on OpenGrant's deadline pages: 129 schemes closed in November 2026 and 78 in December. How to build a trusts and foundations pipeline gives the stages, the weighting and a twelve-month example.

Step six: record everything

The tracker is the pipeline's memory: one row per funder approach with identity, qualification, timing, money and aftercare fields. The two most often lost are the reason for a decline and the earliest reapplication date; Trust for London allows one application a year and asks unsuccessful applicants to wait 12 months, and most trusts have a similar rule. The tracker also carries each award's reporting dates and conditions until the final report is accepted, because funders judge the next application on the last grant. Grant application tracker: what to record and why lists the columns and gives a template. OpenGrant's saved grants and alerts feed it with scheme records and new matches.

Research by funder type

Trusts are the hardest group to research and the one this guide concentrates on, but a charity's income comes from five kinds of funder, and prospect research differs for each.

Lottery distributors publish everything: programmes, criteria, amounts, decision times and, through 360Giving, every grant. The research question is fit and timing rather than discovery. The National Lottery Community Fund's programme finder lists each programme by nation, amount and decision time; its Awards for All England guidance says it usually funds around one in three applications and asks you to apply at least 16 weeks before the money is needed. How to apply to National Lottery Awards for All England is the worked example.

Community foundations publish their live funds but run many of them, each with its own criteria, geography and dates, so the research is a matter of matching your project to the right fund rather than the foundation as a whole. UK Community Foundations said its members distributed over £183 million through more than 38,000 grants in 2024-25. OpenGrant lists each foundation's live funds on its funder page, and what is a community foundation explains how they differ from trusts.

Government grants are listed on GOV.UK Find a grant with eligibility and alerts, and most name the organisation types they accept. The research is eligibility and the subsidy rules, not discovery.

Companies give through company foundations, which behave like trusts and are researched the same way, and through sponsorship and staff schemes that are not grants at all. A company foundation's register entry and accounts are the record; its brand site often is not.

Trusts need all six steps above, because most publish nothing but their accounts.

How funders check you back

Prospect research runs in both directions. The same registers and data you use to qualify a funder are what the funder uses to qualify you, and knowing what it will see saves surprises. The National Lottery Community Fund publishes the checks it makes: consistency between your application, supporting documents and public records, a current and properly signed governing document, trustee or director details against the relevant regulator, accounts against the other figures you supplied, and bank statements against your financial procedures. Named contacts may be identity-checked. Grant due diligence checks walks through that list from the applicant's side.

Three things follow for research. First, your register entry is part of your case: a charity whose entry describes a different area or purpose from its application has a problem before the assessor reads a word. Second, your accounts should be filed on time, because a late filing is visible on the register and funders notice. Third, your own 360Giving footprint, the grants your publishing funders have reported, is public and tells a prospective funder who else trusts you. A charity with grants from a community foundation and a lottery programme already has references on GrantNav.

Reading a funder's language

Funders describe what they fund in their own vocabulary, and reading it well is part of qualification. Three distinctions matter most.

Programme and strategy. A programme is a scheme with criteria and a route; a strategy is the direction the funder has set for several years. Trust for London's funding page lists two aims, economic justice and social justice, each with named priorities such as decent work, the poverty premium and migrant destitution; an application that fits a priority has a route, one that fits only the aim does not. City Bridge Foundation's Standing with Londoners is a ten-year policy under which programmes open and close, so the programme page, not the policy page, says what is open.

Core, project and unrestricted. Core funding pays for running an organisation; project funding pays for a defined piece of work; unrestricted funds may be spent on any charitable purpose. Funders use the words inconsistently, so read the grant agreement wording where it is published. Full cost recovery, the method that adds a share of overheads to every project budget, is what makes project funding sustainable, and funders that accept it usually say so.

Rolling, round and invitation. A rolling programme accepts applications at any time; a funding round has fixed opening and closing dates; an invitation-only funder has neither. The word a funder uses for its route tells you how to plan the approach and how often you may try.

Reading these distinctions in a funder's guidance, and in its grants list, is what turns a name from a search into a qualified prospect with a realistic amount, a route and a date.

The tools, free and paid

The method runs on free sources. The Charity Commission register at gov.uk shows every registered charity's trustees, work and aims, finances and filed accounts, and the whole dataset can be downloaded; OSCR and the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland do the same for their nations. GrantNav holds every published grant under an open licence. GOV.UK Find a grant lists government grants and the lottery distributors list their programmes. OpenGrant's free tier shows every open scheme in its sources with full criteria and a weekly alert, and puts register facts, 360Giving totals and live schemes on one page per funder. Free UK grant finders sets out what each covers, and GrantNav vs OpenGrant explains how the two open-data tools divide the work.

Paid directories sell editorial descriptions of the small trusts that publish nothing, and that saves time if you approach many of them. On 26 October 2026 GrantFinder's single-user VCSE plan cost £1,020 a year, My Funding Central £100 to £750 plus VAT a year for English organisations with income up to £1 million, and OpenGrant's research tier, which adds past giving, unlimited peer lookups, exports and calendar files, £29 a month per email account. Prospect research tools for freelance trust fundraisers compares them for people who research for several organisations, and GrantFinder alternatives in 2026 for everyone else.

A worked example from start to finish

A fictional community charity in Rochdale runs an advice service and a youth project, has income of £320,000 and needs £70,000 from trusts in the year from April 2027: £30,000 for the youth project, £25,000 of core funding and three items of £5,000.

In November 2026 it writes its specification: registered charity, income band £250,000 to £500,000, Rochdale and Greater Manchester, advice and youth work, three amounts. It searches GrantNav for "advice" and "youth" in the North West between £5,000 and £50,000 and looks up four peer charities as recipients; it runs the peers lookup on its own charity number; and it reads two peers' accounts. Twenty-two funders appear, nine of them for two or more peers.

It qualifies the twenty-two in a week. Six are community foundations and lottery programmes with open schemes and medians near its small items. Five are national trusts with rolling applications or windows and medians between £10,000 and £25,000. Four are letter funders with no website whose accounts show grants to Greater Manchester charities and trustees meeting twice a year. Three say they do not accept unsolicited applications. Four fund the wrong legal form, place or cause. Fifteen go to the qualified stage; seven leave with the reason recorded.

The calendar runs backwards from April 2027. Awards for All England for one £5,000 item goes in by December, allowing 16 weeks. Two community foundation funds with December and February rounds take the other small items. An expression of interest for the youth project goes to a national trust in January, with a second trust scheduled for March in case. Two letter funders receive letters in February for their spring meetings, asking for core costs; Garfield Weston receives a core cost application in January. The weighted pipeline, at one in three for the small funders and one in ten for the large trusts, forecasts £64,000, so two more community foundation prospects are moved up.

By June the tracker shows two awards, one decline with a 12-month wait and feedback recorded, four decisions pending and three prospects carried to the autumn. The research took about four working days; the writing that followed went to funders that had already shown they fund work like this, in this place, at this size.

Common mistakes

Searching for funders before specifying what you need, so that everything looks possible. Reading a funder's stated range instead of its grants list. Asking for the maximum. Writing to a funder whose trustees' report says it does not accept applications. Treating a rolling programme as something to do later. Submitting fewer applications than realistic success rates require. Forgetting the reapplication date. And stopping the record at the award, so that the report is late and the next application starts cold. Each has a guide in this series, and each costs more than the hour of research that avoids it.

Keeping the research current

Funders change. Programmes open and close, strategies shift, trusts pause and resume, and a new set of accounts arrives every year. Date every fact in your tracker, recheck any funder you are about to approach if the date is more than a few months old, and refresh typical awards when the accounts or the 360Giving data update. OpenGrant shows the last-verified date on every funder page and scheme record, and alerts report new schemes that match a saved search. The complete guide to finding grants for a UK charity places this method inside the wider search across government, lottery, trusts, community foundations and companies, and how to write a grant application takes over once a prospect reaches the submitted stage.