FundCore — the grants desk for UK charities
Each month FundCore finds four trusts that fit your charity and writes the application for each, from your own records and in your own voice. £500 a month.
The right trusts
FundCore follows more than 1,000 UK trusts. Each month it brings you the best four, with your chances and how much to ask.
The application, written
A full first draft, written by AI in minutes, on the funder’s own form and from your own records. You check it, change it and send it.
It knows your charity
It learns your work from your own documents, and builds your case on a method David Lloyd has used with charities for over twenty years.
What it won’t do
- Submit an application for you
- Invent a figure
- Send anything without your approval
- Sign in to your mailbox
- Screen anyone’s wealth
- Train AI on your data
Pricing
£500 a month, or £5,500 a year. No setup fee, 12-month term. A trusts fundraiser costs £28,000–35,000 a year.
- Four matched trusts a month, with the reasoning shown
- Four new applications a month, rolling over — reworking one is unlimited
- Your case for support, built and kept current
- Every submission tracked, from sent to decision
- Excel or CSV from any CRM
Founding partners: three months free. No card needed, in exchange for weekly feedback, a case study and your logo.
“Most charities I’ve worked with don’t lose grants because their work is weak. They lose them because nobody has the time to apply well. FundCore gives them that time back, and it asks the questions I would ask.”
David Lloyd, fundraising consultant for over twenty years. His ten questions are the method behind every case for support FundCore builds.
Questions
- Does it actually submit the application?
- Not directly. UK trusts use a mix of portals, Word documents, PDFs and email rather than one standard application system, so there is nothing to submit to automatically. You give FundCore the funder’s form — copied from their portal or out of their Word document — and it answers each question from your case, in their sections, their wording and their word limits. What comes back is a complete answer sheet: their questions, your answers, live word counts, the attachment checklist and a source under every figure, ready to paste back or download as a file. You submit it and tell FundCore you have. From there it takes over the follow-up — chasing acknowledgements, recording the decision, scheduling thank-yous and reports, and asking for feedback when an application is declined. That stretch after you hit send is where applications quietly get lost.
- What if we don't have a case for support?
- That’s normal — most charities your size don’t have one. FundCore starts from what it can already evidence: your website, your CRM, and your own filed accounts on the Charity Commission register, which are full of trustee-approved figures nobody has ever structured. It drafts what it can before asking you a single question, then takes you through the ten questions every funder asks, and emails whoever knows a missing figure rather than leaving you staring at a blank form. It’s the work a fundraising consultant charges £2,000–5,000 for, and no application is strong without it.
- How does FundCore learn about our charity?
- Start by giving it your website. FundCore reads your site and what’s publicly on record about you, then builds a profile — what you do, who you help, where you work — for you to review and correct. That’s usually a minute’s work, and it’s enough to start matching trusts. Then you upload the documents that know your organisation best: the pitch deck you took to a funder, your impact report, your strategy, your last two applications. Anything you correct becomes the source of truth, and later research won’t overwrite your own words. One deliberate limit: FundCore uses the web to understand what you do, never to work out how much of it you do. Every figure comes from your own records, because a charity website rounds up, goes stale, and repeats last year’s number for three years running — and a funder who checks a claim against your filed accounts and finds it wrong is the worst thing this product could do to you.
- Is it really one price?
- £500 a month, or £5,500 a year with one month free. No setup fee, no per-seat pricing, and no charges for how much you write. There is one limit, and we would rather publish it than call the product unlimited: four new applications a month, rolling over if you don’t use them, up to 48 a year. Most charities this size submit ten to thirty, so it guards against a runaway button rather than rationing the product — and if you genuinely need more, ask and we’ll lift it. Reworking an application you’ve already started never counts, however many times you do it. For context, a trusts fundraiser costs £28,000–35,000 a year plus NI and pension. This is under a fifth of that, and it includes the case-for-support work a consultant charges £2,000–5,000 for. One £10,000 grant can cover almost two years of FundCore. There’s a 12-month minimum term, or annual in advance.
- Who is this for?
- UK charities with roughly £500k–£5m in annual income, where trust fundraising isn’t anyone’s full-time job — the CEO or Director is often writing the applications themselves, late at night, and knows they aren’t their best work. Below that income, £500 a month stops being a line item and becomes a trustee agenda item, so we’d rather say so than sell you something that gets cancelled.
- What does onboarding involve?
- A call, then a working session. Building your profile needs a conversation — which programme you’re raising for, which figures are load-bearing, and who in the team knows what. Uploading your documents and a spreadsheet of gifts takes minutes; the DNS records for sending take a few more, and often need whoever manages your website. By week two, the bar we hold ourselves to is this: real evidence requests out to your staff, a pipeline-coverage report, one real application draft against a real funder’s questions, and at least one live submission being tracked.
Ready to see what FundCore could find?
A 30-minute call. If it isn’t a good fit for your charity, we’ll tell you. Book one at fundcore.org.