The VIP (Violence Intervention Project) is a West London charity that runs long-term, trauma-informed Urban Therapy for young people aged 12 to 25 affected by serious youth violence, delivered by a small team split between frontline work and fundraising. The charity depends on grants from trusts, foundations, and other institutional funders in a highly competitive grantmaking environment. Prospects were pieced together from the Charity Commission register, funder lists, open grants data, and word of mouth, then checked one by one in spreadsheets. The VIP partnered with Fluum to build a structured, reusable pipeline of aligned funders instead of restarting research with every new funding push. The approach below is a model any nonprofit fundraising team can use to automate grant and donor prospecting.
OPPORTUNITIES IDENTIFIED
12
Funding and commissioning opportunities matched to The VIP's themes: youth violence, criminal justice, mental health, and multiple disadvantage
VERY STRONG FIT
5
Funders whose stated priorities directly match The VIP's mission and geography
FUNDING IDENTIFIED
£500K+
Across the 12 opportunities, excluding commissioning budgets and uncapped programmes
What The VIP was facing
The VIP depends on grants from trusts, foundations, and other institutional funders, in a highly competitive grantmaking environment. The team is also building its first proper CRM, so growing a high-quality prospect database matters. Before Fluum, prospects came from the Charity Commission register, funder lists, open grants data, and word of mouth, copied into spreadsheets and checked one by one for fit. That approach missed less visible foundations and complex funding vehicles, cost many hours to build and maintain, and restarted from scratch with every new funding need instead of producing a reusable, structured view of potential funders.
• Prospects pieced together from the Charity Commission register, funder lists, open grants data, and word of mouth • Each foundation checked and copied into spreadsheets by hand • Pipeline restarted from scratch with every new funding push • Less visible foundations and complex funding vehicles easy to miss
• Registry, company, and open grants data unified into one clean record per foundation • 12 funding opportunities identified, 5 rated very strong fit • Fit criteria (themes, geography, grant size) applied automatically, shortlist refreshed daily • A structured, reusable pipeline instead of a one-off list
APRIL 2026
The VIP and Fluum agreed a target list of the kinds of foundations to prioritise, and an exclusion list of funders The VIP already speaks with or that are clearly not a fit. Fluum built a custom intelligence agent monitoring funding databases, foundation announcements, and government commissioning cycles for opportunities matching The VIP's profile, producing an initial report of 12 ranked opportunities.
MAY 2026
Fluum pulled registry, company, and open grants data together and overlaid The VIP's existing funder list, so each foundation appeared as a single, clean record with its links and history instead of scattered spreadsheet rows.
ONGOING
Using the agreed fit criteria, themes, geography, and grant size, Fluum produced a prioritised shortlist of aligned foundations and grantmakers, with context on why each one matched. The shortlist updates daily.
"Finding the right funders takes time we don't always have. Fluum does the heavy lifting and surfaces opportunities that match what we do, so we can focus on delivering for our communities."
Alessandro Ferrari, Chair, The VIP (Violence Intervention Project)
For a small charity working in a high-stakes area like serious youth violence, the shift from hunting for funders to cultivating the right ones is the main result. The VIP now has a structured, ongoing pipeline to work through as it grows its CRM, instead of rebuilding a prospect list from zero every time a new funding need comes up.
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