What information do funders always ask for?

England and Wales: This page sets out the position in full. Scotland: the same position, with no difference in principle — the profile holds the same facts, drawn from OSCR’s register rather than the Commission’s. Northern Ireland: the same again, drawn from CCNI’s register. The small-grants programme used as the example below runs in all three nations on the same terms, with only its decision time differing.

Where the information funders ask for is listed

Build the profile from the eligibility fields on real programme pages, not from a generic checklist. Those are the questions funders will ask, and they are more specific than a checklist expects. The profile is the job of whoever writes the bids, and it works the same way in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

It draws on two earlier steps. The income breakdown comes from the step where you map your income and find your concentration risk. The argument stays in the document you made when you wrote your case for support.

The National Lottery’s small-grants programme is the clearest example. It requires a minimum of 2 unrelated committee members. Constituted groups that are not registered charities at all can apply, for grants up to £20,000.

“How many trustees do you have, and are any of them related to each other?” is not on a generic checklist. It is on the form.

So work through the programmes on your own shortlist, write down every factual field they ask for, and build the profile from that union. Add to it every time a new funder asks something the profile could not answer. Working out what a particular funder is after is a separate job, done when you read and decode the funder’s criteria.

What information is almost always asked for

Across the programmes in this guide’s records, the recurring fields fall into five groups:

• Identity — legal name, any working name, charity number from each regulator you are registered with (the Charity Commission, OSCR or CCNI), company number, registered address, website.
• Structure and governance — legal form, the date of the governing document, the number of trustees and whether any are related, how often the board meets, who may sign.
• Money — income and expenditure for the last full year, the reserves figure and the policy behind it, the current year’s budget, bank details and the year end.
• People and reach — staff and volunteer numbers, beneficiary numbers, the area you work in, how beneficiaries are involved.
• Policies — which ones you hold, when each was adopted and when each was last reviewed.

Keep the source of each figure beside it. When a funder asks for income, the answer should be the figure in the filed accounts, not a recollection of it. They are the accounts you sent in when you filed your accounts.

Which policies funders ask about

Funders ask which policies you hold, and the list they ask for is not the list the law requires. Those are genuinely different questions, and conflating them is how charities end up adopting documents nobody needed while missing one they did.

The separation is worked out in full on the governance pages, starting with adopt a whistleblowing policy and the policy pages beside it. This page does not re-run it. Three examples of how differently the answers fall:

• Safeguarding — the funder requires it where the work puts you in contact with children or adults at risk: National Lottery Community Fund requires an appropriate written safeguarding policy where the project works with children or adults at risk. Whether a written safeguarding policy is itself a legal requirement is a separate question, answered when you adopt a safeguarding policy. The safeguarding lead and the board’s oversight are covered when you appoint a safeguarding lead.
• Complaints — Fundraising Regulator Code r.2.3.1 — registered fundraising organisations MUST have a complaints procedure, publicised and accessible. That is the Fundraising Regulator’s Code, which is expectation rather than law; whether charities must have a complaints procedure is answered on its own page.
• Reserves — this one genuinely is a legal duty, and not because a funder asked. Charities (Accounts and Reports) Regulations 2008 reg 40(3)(p) — the trustees' annual report MUST state the reserves policy, or state that there is none

Record in the profile which policies you hold and when each was reviewed. Record the legal position once, on the governance pages, and link to it rather than restating it in every bid.

One copy of the profile, kept current

A funder research profile is a single, dated document holding the facts every application asks for, each with its source beside it. It is worth building only if there is exactly one of it.

Put it somewhere the whole board can reach, date it, and review it quarterly and after every set of filed accounts. When a figure changes — income, reserves, trustee numbers, staff numbers — change it in the profile first and copy from there. Never the other way round.

You now have one dated set of facts to answer every form from. The next step is to find funders that genuinely fit. Later, the profile becomes the raw material when you assemble your supporting documents for a particular funder.

Common mistake: rebuilding the same facts for every application

Each form asks slightly differently, so it feels easier to answer from scratch each time. The cost is not the wasted hours. It is inconsistency: funders compare, and a figure that moves between bids invites questions you then have to answer about your own accounts.

Worked example

Tollgate Youth CIO applies to four funders in a year, one of them for its youth worker post.

The project description is different every time. The governance facts are not: the same legal form, the same trustees, the same bank details, the same policy list, the same last-filed income figure. Tollgate assembles those once, with the source noted beside each figure, and answers every form from the same document.

The saving is real but secondary. The point is that all four applications say the same thing about Tollgate. That includes the trustee count, which is the field the small-grants programme tests against its own minimum.