What is a case for support and what goes in it?

England and Wales: This page sets out the position in full. Scotland: the same duty, stated more firmly — OSCR grounds it in statute rather than guidance, and a breach is treated as misconduct in the administration of the charity. See the section below. Northern Ireland: covered in part. CCNI publishes a full fundraising guidance suite and it is described below, but it states no equivalent numbered duty to raise funds only for the charity’s own purposes; the closest thing in it is a checklist prompt about what to do when an appeal falls short.

The purposes check: the one legal rule for a case for support

Before anything else, the trustees check that the case for support describes work the charity’s purposes authorise. Everything else in writing a case is craft. This page assumes you have already mapped your income and found your concentration risk, so you know which gap the case should fill. This part is not, and it is where a fundraising decision turns into a legal problem.

The Charity Commission’s guidance on fundraising for England and Wales, CC20, sets out six duties for trustees. The second, verbatim, is to:

only raise funds for your charity’s purpose, and not for any other purpose

The third follows it: only use the funds you raise for the purposes for which they were raised.

Put the two together and the risk is plain. If you appeal for something, the money arrives tied to it.

A donor who gives to the thing your case describes has given for that thing. If the objects do not authorise it, the charity now holds money it cannot lawfully apply. And it cannot quietly spend it on something else instead, because that is the third duty.

So before you write a word of the case, read the objects in the exact words adopted when you held your founding meeting. Then check one thing: that this document describes work the objects authorise. If it does not, one of the two has to change. Usually that means the case. Occasionally it means changing your charitable purposes first.

What goes in a case for support

Nothing prescribes the contents. What follows is convention — a shape that answers the questions funders and donors ask, in the order they ask them:

• Who you are and what you exist for, in the objects’ own terms rather than a slogan.
• The need, with evidence, in your own area rather than nationally. You do this in detail when you write the need statement and evidence it.
• What you do about it, concretely enough that someone could picture a session.
• What changes as a result, and how you know. The distinction that matters is the one drawn when you separate outputs from outcomes from impact.
• What it costs, using the figure from when you calculated the project’s full cost.
• Who runs it — governance, staffing, the track record.
• What the money would buy, at two or three different amounts.

Write it long. This is the only document in the sequence that is allowed to be. Every later step is an exercise in cutting it down to somebody else’s word limit, and cutting is far easier than expanding.

A source document, not an application

The case is not an application. A case for support is the source document that every application is made from.

That distinction is what makes the work worth doing. A charity that writes each bid from scratch produces a different account of itself every time, and funders compare. A charity with an adopted case produces consistent answers and spends its time on the part that does vary — the funder’s own criteria.

Adopt it at a board meeting and minute it. A case for support is a statement about the charity, made in the charity’s name, and the trustees are accountable for what it claims. Review it annually, and whenever the objects change.

Scotland: the same duty, set in statute

Scotland reaches the same place by a different route, and the duty there is harder-typed. OSCR states it directly: charity trustees must only spend donations on the purposes for which they were raised. On appeals specifically, OSCR’s wording is, verbatim: “Any funds raised for a particular project or appeal is a restricted fund and can only be spent on the stated activities.”

The basis is section 66 of the Charities and Trustee Investment (Scotland) Act 2005. Section 66(1)(a) requires a charity trustee to seek, in good faith, to ensure that the charity acts in a manner consistent with its purposes. That is on the face of the Act, so in Scotland this is a legal duty and not only guidance.

The consequence is framed differently, and the difference is worth knowing. Section 66(4) says a breach of the general duties is to be treated as misconduct in the administration of the charity. Misconduct is an OSCR regulatory concept: it opens the regulator’s own powers, including inquiry and removal.

It is not, on the face of the Act, a statement that the trustee is personally liable to repay the money. That personal liability is how the equivalent failure is framed in England and Wales. Whether Scots law imposes that personal liability separately was not established in the research behind this guide, and this page does not assert it.

OSCR attaches other fundraising duties to the same general-duties section. Two are worth carrying into the case itself. The charity’s name, any working name and its Scottish Charity Number must appear on external fundraising material. And that requirement extends to anyone producing fundraising documents on the charity’s behalf.

Northern Ireland: a full guidance suite, without this particular duty

CCNI publishes comprehensive fundraising guidance — a detailed guide and shorter guides for trustees and for the public. Its account of how fundraising is regulated is clear, and it confirms the wider picture. Fundraising in Northern Ireland is largely self-regulated, overseen by the Fundraising Regulator. Charities that choose not to register with the Regulator are still expected to comply with the Code when they fundraise.

Street collections, house-to-house fundraising and raffles are separately regulated, by the police rather than by CCNI. The rules are on run a collection lawfully and run a lottery or raffle lawfully.

CCNI also states the limit of its own interest. Its regulatory concern in fundraising is normally limited to serious or persistent failures that indicate wider governance failures. It does not regulate day-to-day fundraising practice.

What is not there is the duty this page is built around. CCNI’s trustee guide is a practical checklist rather than a numbered list of duties. No explicit statement that trustees must raise funds only for the charity’s own purposes was found in those terms.

The closest content is a prompt about an appeal that does not raise enough. It asks whether the charity has made provision for returning funds, or applying them to a different purpose. That points to CCNI’s own route for requesting a scheme.

That is an implication, not a statement. The prudent reading for a Northern Ireland charity is that the purposes boundary works the same way, because the underlying trust-law position is the same. But the explicit regulator statement other nations have does not exist here.

With an adopted case for support you have the argument. The next step is to build a reusable funder research profile of your charity: the facts every application asks for, kept apart from the case.

Common mistake: describing work the governing document does not authorise

The case is usually written by whoever is best at describing need, and that person is rarely reading the objects while they write. The Commission’s guidance puts the duty second on its list of six: raise funds only for your charity’s purpose. Money raised on a case that goes beyond the objects becomes a restricted fund for a purpose the charity cannot pursue. And the third duty stops you spending it on anything else.

Worked example

Wrenfield Village Hall runs a weekly lunch club for older people and lets the hall to a toddler group. Its committee wants to start a youth project. Its fundraiser writes the case for support around it, because that is the newest and most fundable-sounding thing the hall does.

Nobody reads the objects first. Suppose those objects are drawn around the provision and maintenance of a village hall for the inhabitants of the village. Then the youth project may well be within them.

If they are drawn around the welfare of older residents, it is not. Then every pound raised on that case arrives restricted to a purpose Wrenfield cannot lawfully pursue.

The fix belongs before the writing, not after it. Either the case is rewritten so it describes what the objects authorise, or the committee changes the governing document first and then writes the case. What it cannot do is publish the case, take the money, and spend it on the lunch club instead.