Prime Time

As someone who has been fundraising for a charity - the New Horizon Youth Centre - for 37 years it's an unusual opportunity to be allowed to pick five top tips for funders. I worked as Director of the project - a drop-in advice and day centre for homeless teenagers in London from 1970 to 1973. I have been on the Management Council ever since and Chairman since 1986. Surprisingly, homeless teenagers remain an incredibly hard group of people around whom to fundraise. We represent a relatively inexpensive intervention in the harrowing journey from the care system to prison: annual running costs of the Centre are roughly equal to what it costs to keep ten men in jail for a year.

So here goes:

1. Core Funding. So many funders balk at much of a commitment to core funding. So many want to fund new initiatives that they can chart and identify with, and I understand that. But the base costs of a project are what keep it alive, and many of the 'new projects' that applicants come up with have been extrapolated from existing work and dressed up purely for the purpose of new funding. This clearly wastes the time of both the funder and the recipient. It seems to me that an applicant project either fits a funders' interests or it doesn't; contorting it to do so does neither party much good. What we need is core commitment. The record of the bigger trusts is impressive in this regard and has become more so in recent years. Understandably it is smaller funders who want to make their mark with more easily defined specific pieces of work.

2. Feedback and maintaining a relationship. At New Horizon we have enjoyed some wonderfully fruitful relationships with funders of all sorts. It seems to me to be rewarding for both parties. The funder derives a sense of accountability and can see how their money is working. The recipient enjoys the benefit of the discipline of both reviewing the project and of explaining it to an outsider. I feel strongly that projects that fail to keep their funders updated should never have funding renewed. An inability to abide by a disciplined feedback process is a sure-fire indication that a project is poorly managed.

3. Finding the right balance between short and long-term commitment. Flexibility seems to me to be the watch word. There are times when voluntary projects need bridging funds or short-term funding to enable them to get through to a next phase of funding - such as when a small project is battling to secure European funding which can be extremely worthwhile but cumbersome to secure. But there are other times when a project requires a genuine long-term commitment. I think that this should never be more than three years without wholesale review, but I also think that it is beneficial for the project to, at each annual renewal, take stock and report the effect of the funding to the award giving trust.

4. Transparency. I think it extremely healthy for projects and funders to be open and honest with each other at every turn. It is useful for a project to understand precisely why a funder did or did not fund their work. It is equally healthy for the funder to know why the project applied to them in the first place.

5. Pro-active funding. This is potentially the most exciting and rewarding area of funding for both donor and recipient projects. City Bridge Trust has blazed a trail in the area that I know most about. Looking at a developing social need, or a developing issue, they have hatched schemes for addressing what is happening. The City Bridge knives initiative did precisely this in response to escalating knife crime.

This remains an exciting and challenging time to be either a funder or a voluntary project. I would go even further: it is, I think, the most exciting time in our sector in the last three decades. It is a prime time to be a philanthropist. The role of the welfare state is evolving; tax structures are being reviewed, and ambitions for provision in response to need are rising.

Jon Snow is the Presenter of Channel Four news. From 1970-73 he was Director of the New Horizon youth centre - a day centre for homeless teenagers. He remains Chair of the project. Jon is also deputy chair of the Media Trust, and a trustee of the National and Tate Galleries. He is a director of the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, North London; and a trustee of the Noel Buxton Trust.