How to do a competitor analysis to find more prospects

Looking for new prospects is an essential part of the trust fundraising process. We’ll assume for now that you’re already engaging with all your current funders, and you’ve identified your lapsed funders and have a plan of action in place for those too. If you’re looking to grow your trust income, the next step would be to identify some new prospects who you haven’t applied to before. Whilst there are lots of resources out there to help you do this (databases, newsletters etc.) one of the techniques you can use is to do a competitor funding analysis.

When I say ‘competitor’ what I mean is a charity that works in the same cause area as you, in the same geographical area or has an income of a similar level. Ideally when doing your analysis you’d want to look at a mix of charities – so perhaps some in the same cause area, some in a geographically similar location and some perhaps in a broader category (e.g. health charities) but who have a similar level of income.

Doing a competitor funding analysis can be useful for three reasons

When you consider that there are over 10,000 trusts and foundations in the UK, getting a small list of funder names that have already been researched, applied to and have given grants to charities that are similar to yours eliminates some (but not all) of your own research.
If the same trusts keep coming up in your competitor analysis it’s a good sign that the funder may be interested in your work.
If you’re just starting out in trust fundraising, attempting to do a search on a database of thousands of potential funders can be overwhelming. Starting with a list of 50 or so, is in my opinion, a much better use of your time.

How to do your competitor analysis

Make a list of charities who work in your cause area, the same geographic location or who are a similar size in terms of income. Ask colleagues if you’re not sure who to put on the list. Think about the charities that funders might ask you if you work together or charities that go to the same networking meetings. You could also think about charities that you look up to – if you want to grow to a particular level of turnover, think about adding those charities who are already there to your list. They will be getting funding from the people that you’re aiming to get funding from so are worth considering for your list. Ideally you want 10-20 organisations on your list.
Look up those charities on the Charity Commission website. Go to ‘Find a charity’ and either type the name or charity registration number into the search box. Once you’ve found the right record go to their annual accounts. Then scroll down to see if they publish either a list of funders in the financial section or perhaps a ‘thank you to our supporters’ list somewhere in the narrative. Not all charities publish who they get their funding from, so you may not always find this information. That’s why we want 10-20 on the list as you’re unlikely to get a list of funders from all those organisations.
Once you have found names of funders, put your list in an excel spreadsheet or google sheets and sort alphabetically. This way you’ll start to see if particular funders come up multiple times - this indicates that they really are interested in funding organisations who are similar to you.
You may also see some names of trusts you haven’t previously identified. These are ones you can then go away and research yourself to see if they would be suitable to apply to.