Finding Funding 
Unlike Public Sources of funding, charities are not very well known about. Although there are tens of thousands of them in the UK, most of the charities which will consider funding you are small bodies which are obscure and hard to find. There are also no definitive, or even comprehensive, search engines or lists that will make life easy for you, and many charities do not have websites and may not even be listed online. You might think that tracking down the small minority of bodies that will fund you is like searching for a needle in a haystack! But don't worry! With the right approach to searching, you can get a long way very quickly.
The major tool that will make life easier for you is our Funding Database. It has around 800 funders in it which have been handpicked by us as being of interest to postgraduates. More are added by our team regularly. However, while this resource is great, and should be your first port of call, don't think that it is anything close to comprehensive. If you want to raise a few thousand pounds for research or for a conference, our database might be all you need. But if you want substantial sums, it's a very good idea to do some hunting yourself! This section will give you some hints on your overall strategy in finding funders, and then how you can use the internet, books, and other methods to find as many potential leads as possible.
General Strategy
Your master-plan should be to produce a long list of the postal (and email, if possible) addresses of potential funders, alongside any other information on eligibility, deadlines, amounts etc you can gain easily. Potential funders are bodies which you think you might be eligible for on face value, based on the information you can find. Only rarely can you tell for certain if you are eligible to apply to a charity without actually asking them. That's why the best approach is to make a long list of potential funders, and then contact them all. Many will end up telling you aren't eligible after all (perhaps they stopped making awards, ran out of money, or had eligibility criteria that you didn't know about), but some will invite you to apply- and from there you've got a good chance. We'll discuss this more in the next section Request Forms.
Three general ground rules to finding charities:
1. Do not discount a body unless you can see that it is inappropriate, because many are quite flexible.
2. Make sure a charity says that it makes awards to individuals, because the majority do not (they are for organisations). Helpfully, this is one of the things charities tend to make clear.
3. Check out all of the publically available information on a charity before you contact them. This might not be much, but if they have a website- do take the time to read it to avoid getting the wrong end of the stick!
Where and How to Look: 5 Key Places
There are five main places you can look for Charities: our Funding Database, on the internet at specific sites, at your local library, at learned societies and associations, and by asking certain advisory bodies for guidance. Click on the icon to get specific guidance!
OUR DATABASE LOOKING ONLINE LOCAL LIBRARY SOCIETIES ASK FOR ADVICE
