What Is a Case for Support? Free Template for Charities

Step-by-step version: What is a case for support and what goes in it? — from our guide to running a UK charity.

What a case for support is

Most small charities treat a case for support as a luxury — something you write once you have a fundraising team. Writing my own charity’s applications taught me the opposite: the smaller you are, the less you can afford to reinvent the argument each time a portal opens. A case for support is a single, well-evidenced master document that sets out the problem your charity exists to solve, the difference you make, and what you’re asking for, written once and then adapted for different audiences and applications. Instead of starting from a blank page, you pull tailored sections from this document, keeping your messaging consistent and saving drafting time.

Think of it as the source material your fundraising team, and increasingly your AI grant writer, draws on for every bid. NCVO’s 2024 Almanac puts around 80% of UK charities under £100,000 a year in income (2021/22 data) — at that scale there’s rarely a fundraising team, just one overstretched person, which makes a reusable master document more valuable, not less. The full journey from funder research to reporting is in our grant funding handbook.

The 8 sections (with prompts)

A complete case for support covers eight areas: the problem, your solution, evidence of impact, why now, why you, your ask, the budget, and a call to action, each answering a specific question a funder or donor will be silently asking as they read. Missing any one of these tends to produce applications that feel thin or unconvincing, even when the underlying work is strong.

1. The problem — What issue exists, for whom, and how big is it? Use a named statistic where possible.
2. Your solution — What does your charity actually do about it, in plain terms?
3. Evidence of impact — What outcomes can you show, with numbers or stories?
4. Why now — What’s changed, or what’s urgent, that makes this the moment to fund you?
5. Why you — What makes your charity credible to deliver this, versus anyone else?
6. Your ask — Exactly what you want: how much, for what, over what period.
7. The budget — A clear breakdown showing the ask is realistic and well-costed.
8. Call to action — What you want the reader to do next, stated explicitly.

For the budget section specifically, our charity budget template gives you a structure that plugs straight into this part of the document, and our full cost recovery calculator keeps overheads in the number.

From experience: A case for support earns its keep on the third application, not the first. While building CharityIQ’s grant-finder I read hundreds of funder pages, and the questions barely change: the problem, why you, the cost. Answer them once and applications stop being writing exercises, and start being assembly jobs.

Worked example: small charity, £250k ask

Here’s how the 8 sections might look for a small youth charity seeking £250,000 over three years for a mentoring programme expansion.

Section	Worked example content
The problem	Local NEET (not in education, employment or training) rate among 16-24s in the borough, cited to official statistics.
Your solution	One-to-one mentoring pairing trained volunteers with young people for 12 months.
Evidence of impact	Outcomes from the pilot cohort: percentage moving into education, training or work.
Why now	Waiting list has doubled; current capacity turns away eligible young people.
Why you	Ten years’ delivery track record, named partnerships with local schools and JobCentre Plus.
Your ask	£250,000 over three years to double mentoring capacity from 60 to 120 places.
The budget	Staffing, volunteer training and expenses, evaluation, and a modest overhead allocation.
Call to action	A meeting request or a specific fund/programme the ask is tailored to.

Note that every figure here is illustrative; when you build your own, use your actual monitoring data, not estimates, and cite any external statistics to a primary source such as the gov.uk NEET statistics collection. Our example grant application answers show this style question by question.

Evidence bank: stats and stories to gather

Before you write a single word of your case for support, build an evidence bank: a running collection of statistics, quotes, case studies and outcome data that you can drop into any section without hunting for it under deadline pressure. I keep one myself — a running document where every usable number and quote lands as it appears. Charities that keep this updated year-round produce far stronger applications than those who scramble to find a good quote the night before a deadline.

• External statistics that frame the scale of the problem, cited to gov.uk, ONS, or a relevant sector body.
• Internal monitoring data: outcomes, reach, and year-on-year trends from your own delivery (our outcome indicator picker helps you pick which outcomes matter).
• Beneficiary quotes and case studies, collected with proper consent, refreshed regularly so they don’t go stale.
• Third-party validation: awards, evaluations, or endorsements from partners or commissioners.

Versioning: grants vs individuals vs corporates

The same underlying case for support needs different framing for different audiences: grant funders want evidence, outcomes and a costed budget; individual donors respond more to story and emotional connection; corporates often want to know about visibility, staff engagement opportunities and shared values. Keep one master document, then maintain three tailored derivatives rather than starting fresh each time. I learned the one-master rule the slow way — re-answering the same “why you” question for every funder until I wrote it down once.

Practically, this means your grants version leads with the problem and evidence, your individual-giving version leads with a beneficiary story, and your corporate version leads with alignment and partnership benefits, while all three draw on the same facts underneath. This is exactly the kind of structured reuse that a well-built grant application process depends on, and it connects directly to your wider fundraising strategy.

Free template

Our free case for support template mirrors the 8 sections above, with prompts for each one, space for your evidence bank, and separate tabs for the grants, individual and corporate versions. I built the template myself — the structure I draft from for my own charity’s applications, tightened up after reading what funders actually ask. [Download the free case for support template — email capture]

The full template text is also included below so the content is useful even without downloading:

Case for support: section-by-section prompts

• The problem: In two to three sentences, what issue exists and how many people does it affect?
• Your solution: In plain English, what does your charity do about this problem?
• Evidence of impact: What are your three strongest outcome statistics from the last 12 months?
• Why now: What has changed recently that makes this urgent?
• Why you: What track record, partnerships or expertise make you credible?
• Your ask: How much, for what, over what period, restricted or unrestricted?
• The budget: Link to or attach your itemised costing.
• Call to action: What specific next step do you want the reader to take?

What to do next

Download the free template, block out half a day to draft your first version using your existing evidence, and get one honest external read before you use it. Once it exists, every future grant application and appeal becomes faster and stronger, because you’re adapting rather than starting from nothing — our grant application pre-submit checklist catches the last-minute slips.

Want your case for support to feed directly into AI-drafted grant applications? Join the AI grant writer waitlist →