Category: Poor

Understanding outcomes will help you not only to be successful with your grant applications but also in how you monitor the funded project during and after the funding period. Monitoring the use of funds Some monitoring required by funders is very light touch; others can be very rigorous and will require significant time. Big Lottery funding (Reaching Communities) and ESF (European Social Funding) are examples of funders with quite stringent requirements for reporting. They expect you to budget in some regular admin hours to enable the grant finances and activity to be monitored effectively. Outcomes – What you are planning to do and what difference do you want to make? There are two main types of outcomes you can record and monitor to ensure your funded project is achieving what…

In part 6 we looked at getting your income mix right. We are now going to look at Match Funding and Financial Sustainability, which often come up on grant application forms. Match funding It’s always worth checking if a funder is expecting to see some level of Match Funding. Match funding means that the amount you are requesting from the funder is matched by the amount you are also able to put into the pot. For example if your project costs £12,000 you may request £6,000 from the funder but must show where the other £6,000 will come from. Your 'match' can be in monetary form from another income source or from your reserves. It could also be in terms of volunteer time, or other costs paid for by the…

Having talked about how to make yourself more fundable in the previous post, we are now going to have two posts considering more about Money. Income streams The greater the diversity of options you hold for income, the more financially stable your charity will be and the more confidence a funder will have in your financial resilience. There are many possibilities: Donations – Fundraising events, special offerings, regular donors, crowd funding. These funds are normally unrestricted (see below). Grants – Generally awarded by grant making trusts as restricted funding, given for a specific activity / purchases. They are often project based (more below). Earned Income – Selling goods or services that might be related or unrelated to your charity's objects. You may need to consider setting up a trading subsidiary…

Having looked at how to find and approach funders, we will now look at how to re-package your activities to become more fundable. Consider a charity or church that ‘works with people in need in their local community’. It costs £50,000 a year to run. Surely the charity just needs four funders to chip in £10,000 per year towards their overall running costs, alongside some regular personal donations and local church support, and their funding requirements will be fully met. Oh that it were that simple! Unfortunately it rarely is. But there are things you can do to help. Split your activity into different fundable projects directly linked to outcomes and impact. In general, funders need to be specific with what they fund, so that normally means they want to…

Having looked in Part 3 at how we find potential funders we will now consider how to approach them. Making the applicationIn essence this is quite simple - approach them the way they ask you to approach them! Some will ask you to fill in their application form electronically and give you their deadline dates. Others may ask for a 2-page letter with a budget attached, explaining what you want to do and why they should fund you. Strangely, some applications for quite large amounts of money can be quite easy to fill in, whilst others for much smaller amounts can be really onerous and time consuming! But normally the greater the amount of funding being sought the greater the amount of detail and consequently time will be needed. Do…