Jean Sainsbury Animal Welfare Trust

The Jean Sainsbury Animal Welfare Trust is one of the few funders that will simply pay the running costs of a rescue and rehoming charity. Donations of £1,000 to £10,000 go towards the general costs of rescuing, rehabilitating and rehoming or releasing animals, with no project budget to construct. For a rescue charity that puts a website squarely in scope, because rehoming pages are how adopters find your animals.

• What they fund: General running costs associated with the rescue, rehabilitation and rehoming or release of domestic, wild and exotic animals. Also vet fees and neutering for owners in financial hardship, feral cat and dog programmes, and the direct protection of endangered species. Occasional pledges of up to £35,000 are made towards larger capital projects, released only once all other funding is in place.
• Typical grants: £1,000 to a normal maximum of £10,000, decided by a trustee panel that meets three times a year. Larger donations are considered case by case.
• Who can apply: Charities registered with a UK charity regulator for at least 12 months, with 12 months of independently examined accounts. You must have an active rehoming, fostering or release policy and a humane destruction policy. Sanctuaries that keep animals without rehoming are excluded, as are charities holding unrestricted reserves above a year’s expenditure. Charities importing animals from overseas face additional criteria.
• The angle: Frame the website as part of your rehoming operation, not a digital project. Adoption listings, rehoming application forms and appeal pages are the machinery of rehoming, so the outcome to lead with is more adoption enquiries and faster placements, with the site as the means.
• Worth knowing: Deadlines are 1 April, 1 August and 1 December. Feedback arrives within 10 to 12 weeks of the deadline and payment usually within four months, so plan ahead. You can only apply once every 12 months, counted from the deadline used, so pick your round carefully. The trust asks for hard copies of your application and accounts by post.

Trustees try to visit charities in their area, and a grant monitoring form is due within six months of spending the money. The trust also encourages grant holders to feature the donation in newsletters, social media and website content, which is easy to honour if the grant helped pay for the site.