Grant funding expected to decline worldwide

Concerns regarding funding seems to be occurring worldwide. The majority of fundraisers who responded to a survey in the United Kingdom believe gifts from trusts and foundations will decline during 2025 — in some cases significantly. 

Support is expected to stay the same or decline in 60.5% of respondent organizations. 

The fundraisers believe the top three areas that will be supported are: cost of living, poverty and basic needs; health and mental health; and children and young people. 

Applications to repeat funders tend to significantly increase income and success rates in comparison with those to cold or new funders. “There is a clear case for investing less time on writing applications and researching new funders,” the greater an organizations pipeline is to established funders, according to authors of the “2025 Trusts and Foundations Insights Survey.” 

Simply submitting more applications won’t increase revenue, according to the authors. By achieving the right workload balance, prioritizing quality over quantity of applications (within reason) and focusing on establishing long-term or multi-year relationships with grant-makers, fundraisers have an opportunity to reduce the impact of being in such a competitive space, they wrote.  

That’s probably good advice since 78% of respondents to the survey believe there is an increase in funders are no longer accepting unsolicited applications.  

Those funders operating grant schemes capped at £5,000 are often facing a disproportionately high volume of applications from across the sector. This increased competition for grants means fundraisers should try to mitigate the risks by planning for a much more diverse pipeline of grant sizes. 

This also means that a charity starting up a trusts and foundation application program will face different challenges than those with a program in place for three years or more. “For example, there will be an expectation to spend more time on researching a first pipeline and setting up internal processes for information gathering, case for support writing, and finance,” according to the authors. 

Of the respondents, 69.47% had a trusts and foundations program for at least five years. 

In terms of AI, there seems to be a learning gap across the fundraising sector in the U.K., especially when it comes to training tools like ChatGPT to deliver better and more accurate results over time, according to the respondents’ data. 

Source: The NonProfit Times