Hi, I’m Alicia
A fundraiser for more than 20 years and a qualified project manager, I help organisations build successful trust fundraising programmes to make amazing services and projects happen.
TRUSTS & FOUNDATIONS I HAVE SECURED GRANTS FROM:
Do any of these sound familiar?
You think your charity has potential to raise money from trusts and foundations but you’re not sure where to start looking for prospects or how to write a successful application.
You just don’t have enough time to research prospects and write the quality applications that you know will secure new grants.
You’ve been doing trusts and foundations fundraising for a while but you need to look at how you can grow your income.
I don’t believe trust fundraising has to be complicated. It’s about creating the right project, crafting a compelling ask and presenting that information to the right funder, in the right format.
My story
My fundraising career started when I got my first charity job as a face-to-face fundraiser – yep, a ‘chugger’. And I actually really enjoyed it but working outside all winter soon lost its appeal. I moved on to the fabulous charity Wallace & Gromit’s Children’s Foundation in Bristol raising money for children’s hospitals across the UK.
Fast forward 21 years and today I work as a fundraising consultant, juggling family life with helping charities to be more effective in their trust fundraising.
In the early days as a freelancer, I used to help organisations who didn’t have the capacity or skills to write the bids themselves. The more organisations I worked with the more I got asked the same questions - how do we find the right trusts to apply to? How do we make our chances of success higher? How do we write really good applications that stands out from the crowd? And how do we even get started in trust fundraising when we’ve never done it before?
The problem was I was limited to the number of organisations I could help at any one time and only those who could afford to pay for my time as a freelancer. So I started to think about how I could help more organisations and provide the resources they needed for effective and successful grant fundraising. In 2019, I set up the Trust Fundraising Hub which now has over 5,000 members all supporting each other and sharing advice and in 2020 I launched an online course, Raising the Bar, to help people starting out in trust fundraising to write successful applications.
These days, I still write applications - it’s important to me that I understand the challenges trust fundraisers are facing first hand. I also support charities who are new to trust fundraising to get started, and I help people who have been fundraising for a while to review their programmes and make their applications more successful.
“We’ve worked with Alicia for over six months and she’s been an invaluable resource to our Trust Fundraising programme at Princess Alice Hospice. She has undertaken a review of our Trust file, identified key prospects and progressed these to submitted applications. As a result of her input, we have secured over £80,000 in income with several outcomes still pending. Alicia has also built-up cases for need in several areas of work, working with colleague across the Hospice to gather information and create bids. She is an excellent bid writer and a pleasure to work with.”
- MICHELLE GULLIVER, PRINCESS ALICE HOSPICE
MY PARTNERSHIP WITH ECOLOGI
I am fully committed to reducing my carbon footprint which is why I have partnered with Ecologi. Each month, I make a financial contribution to Ecologi which offsets my estimated carbon emissions by planting trees and supporting carbon avoidance projects around the world.
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