All the fundraising advice I've ever read is trying to solve one problem. How do you get someone to give?

There's a second problem nobody writes about, and it's the one I keep seeing. They do give. Generously, quickly, sometimes more than you asked for. And then you find you're only allowed to spend it on one thing.

A fundraising director told me earlier this year that roughly four pounds in every five coming through his door was restricted. Tied to one named project. He could only spend it on that project, and it couldn't touch the wages or the building. He had a four-year plan, but he could tell me exactly why the split looked the way it did.

You need to move someone, so you go deep on one person in one service. That's the right instinct. It's what every storytelling newsletter tells you to do, including this one.

The funder is moved. Moved by the thing you showed them, because that's the only thing you showed them. So that's what gets funded. The cheque comes through for the women's centre, because the women's centre is who they met.

Nobody did anything wrong. The story worked exactly as designed.

It aimed the funding at a service instead of an organisation, and eighteen months later you can't pay the safeguarding lead, or the rent on the building all three services run out of.

For a long time I thought the answer was to be less specific. Tell the big story. Talk about the whole organisation.

Back then I was wrong, and it's worth saying why, because it's the mistake this edition could easily push you into.

A story about everything your charity does moves nobody. It can't. There's no person in it, no moment, nothing anybody can picture. You end up with the sentence every charity homepage already has, the one about being a leading provider of integrated services, and the funder feels nothing and gives nothing. That's not a better outcome. That's the same problem with worse storytelling.

The specificity isn't the fault.

The fault is that the specific story arrived on its own. Finished and sealed up, an account of one service with nothing above it and nothing after it. So that's what the funder bought, because that's the only thing that was for sale.

Here's what I mean by nothing above it.

You show them the woman at the women's centre. Her words, her moment, the thing that turned. Good. Keep all of it.

Then you tell them the thing they cannot see from where they're standing. That the person who sat with her that morning also sits with the children in the family recovery service. That the supervision holding that conversation is the same supervision holding forty others this month. That what they've just met isn't a project. That's what this organisation is like, and that day, in that room, you could see it.

You haven't made the story less specific. You've told them what the specific thing is evidence of.

And that changes what they're investing in. "That's a good project" is a restricted gift. "Those are people who know what they're doing" is an unrestricted one. Unrestricted funding is given on trust, and trust is a claim about the organisation, not about the project.

Worth being clear about what this isn't. The new paragraph sits above the story. It doesn't reach back into it. You don't make her more grateful, more transformed or more useful to you, and nothing she said changes. If the only way to make a story fund the whole organisation is to adjust what happened to her, it isn't a fix. It's the thing this newsletter has spent thirty editions arguing against.

Worth saying plainly, because it would be easy to read this as a complaint about funders.

They funded what they were shown. That's not a failure of generosity or a failure of understanding. They did the sensible thing with what they had. Show a funder one service and one service is what they'll fund.

Restricted funding still pays for the work. It keeps the lights on in the building it's tied to, and a charity turning it down on principle would be a charity in trouble.

The problem isn't that restricted income exists. It's the ratio, and the fact that almost nobody chose it.

If four in five of your pounds arrive tied, that number was decided. Not in a budget meeting. In a hundred small choices about which story to tell and how to end it, made by people who were never told those choices had a price.

Your fundraisers weren't briefed on it. Your comms team certainly wasn't. Whoever wrote the last case study was trying to make somebody feel something, and they succeeded, and the cost of it turned up in a spreadsheet they never see.

That's fixable, and it's fixable this week, because it's one paragraph.

Next week: what sits above the services, and how you find it when your charity does four unrelated things.

This one takes a story you've already sent a funder and works out what it was actually asking for. Then it drafts the paragraph that changes the answer.

It has four limits built in. It won't touch the story itself, because the fix sits above it and never inside it. It won't invent an organisational claim you haven't made, which matters because that's the easy way to make the output sound impressive and the fastest way to put something untrue in front of a funder. It stops if the only thing you give it is a case study. And if your charity genuinely does one thing, it says so rather than manufacturing a layer that isn't there.

Paste the whole thing in cold. You don't need to prepare anything.

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Don't go back through everything you've ever published. You'll open the folder, see how much is in there, and close it again.

Take the last one you sent a funder. Read the final paragraph and ask what it left them believing.

If the answer is "that's a good project", you've found the cheapest fix available to you this month. It's one paragraph, and it's the difference between funding you can spend and funding you can only watch.