For charities and community groups

(GBR) Lottery funding, council funding, government funding, trusts and foundations, business sponsorship, individual donors. And most of these are grants, not ongoing funding. Micro grants of £250. Small grants of £5,000. Medium grants of £30,000. Large grants of £100,000. As you might expect, it’s a truism that the larger organisations get the larger grants. And government support is overwhelmingly channelled into the major charities, agencies and organisations.

And that’s just the start. You must generate your own funding. Offering services, training, membership, consultancy, products and information, advice and signposting. And constantly proving the value of your work. In numbers. In changes. With robust evidence (especially in these difficult funding times for the public sector).

The two paragraphs above apply to the majority of public/community sector organisations, social enterprises, agencies, charities, partnerships and even individuals. It also applies to some council services, especially the non-statutory ones such as sports and arts development.

Funding. Certainly a maze to get through. Either a frustrating, confusing conundrum of multi-modal pleading, or a wealth of opportunities to bring in tons of dosh by asserting your worth?

Probably somewhere between the two.

So what MediaSnackers wants to do here is offer a brief digest of funding signposting and the context of why this could be important to us/you:

LOTTERY FUNDING

It’s got a Marmite reputation in some sections of the press. The National Lottery started awarding grants in 1995, and has funded thousands of thousands of projects from pigeon racing clubs to major visitor attractions. The funds are awarded and administered through various different types of organisations:

• Arts Council England

• Big Lottery Fund

• Heritage Lottery Fund

• Sport England

One of the best schemes is Awards for All, a simple small grants scheme making awards of between £300 and £10,000 which aims to help improve local communities and the lives of people most in need. The application form is short and simple and you will find out if you are successful within six weeks.

You can search information on current funding programmes across the UK through the National Lottery Gateway.

THE DIRECTORY OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Most of what you’ll ever need to know about UK and European funding opportunities, publications and training is offered by The Directory of Social Change, who have been supporting the voluntary and community sector for over 30 years. And its products (all of which offers updates to your inbox):

• Trust Funding : 4,400 trusts giving £3.6 billion

• Company Giving : 490 companies giving £808 million

• Government Funding : over £2.3 billion local, regional, national and European sources

• Grants For Individuals : £362 million funds for welfare and education

OTHER

Check out these reliable sites/directories who help in keep you abreast of new developments in social policy and legislation plus detailing grants and available monies:

• Funderfinder—the original oft-quoted online resource for funding finding, or finding funding for that matter

• The Association of Charitable Foundations—the leading membership association for trusts and foundations in the UK with over 300 members ranging in size from small and local grant-makers to some of the world’s largest foundations

• DirectGov—a list of funding schemes

• Charities Aid Foundation—working to create greater value for charities and social enterprise by transforming the way donations are made and the way charitable funds are managed

• ?The Charity Commission—registers and regulates charities in England and Wales, so it’s our job to make sure all charities meet all their legal requirements and to work with charity trustees to put things right if they go wrong

• Community Foundation Network—aims to help clients create lasting value from their local giving
  through the network of community foundations

• The Funding Network—enables individuals to join together to fund social change projects

• National Association for Voluntary and Community Action —the national voice of local support and development organisations in England.

• ACRE—national network of Rural Community Councils

• GuideStar UK—the first place to look for comprehensive information about every charity

Have we missed anybody out? Leave some ideas for other funds, your experience of dealing with any of the agencies listed and/or success stories, tips, tricks etc in the comments.

The Post Amble

MediaSnackers have never received a grant. Organisations/brands have paid us to do speaking/masterclasses, training, consultancy and projects. However, we do have funding expertise and we’re delighted to offer help in your employing us as a partner in your fundraising bids. That’s not to say we’re going to sit in on planning meetings or proof read your lottery application. That’s up to you. What we do offer is the open invitation to let us know when you have a project idea that will use MediaSnackers as your social media partner. That might be in a one-off youth project, a creative consultation, a capacity building training programme for your staff, board and/or volunteers or a more open brief to audit your current online presence and offer solutions to keeping you abreast of social media.

Sadly we’re a bit busy to offer much one to one advice, but we know how you might get this. First off, look both online and offline. Talk to your local authority, many larger metropolitan and county councils employ ‘external funding officers’ who are charged with bringing in funds both directly to the council as well as helping local groups, clubs, agencies and organisations to bid to grant makers and other funding sources. They can’t ever guarantee success (no bid should ever have 100% chance of success) but these people can immeasurably improve your chances with realistic advice on all aspects of a bid such as proper budgeting, full cost recovery, proving outcomes or evaluating realistically. Other available sources of information, advice or signposting include Councils for Voluntary Service, Libraries and education or employability providers. Your area might have a local funding forum that might be worth joining or keeping your eye on, for example, all credit to Sheffield City Council who top a google search if you simply search for ‘funding forum’.

Then there’s online. Be it the ‘good causes’ lottery funding, the many trusts and foundations who are often looking to fund innovative projects, central government funding or a survey of area-based grants resulting from the often confusing world of Local Strategic partnerships, there’s information online related to your one. Or there should be. Set up RSS feeds so that you can bring the web to you, some funders like deadlines and quick turnovers, others maintain grant programmes unchanged for years, either way you can use search terms to narrow down your research e.g. ‘youth technology funding’ or ‘social media grants’. By being forearmed and forewarned of funding opportunities (or indeed, cuts to funding) you can save time and effort by targeting your applications to those sources offering the best fit to your work.

Large organisations produce email newsletters, such as the Big Lottery, good ways to get a ‘feel’ for the type of projects they’re keen to fund. Sometimes the simple language of funding priorities can require some lateral thinking. Older Peoples projects using facebook. Mental Health initiatives working with blogs. Poetry on Twitter. Council care services on an iPhone app.

Our advice would be to produce an over-arching project plan, considering all the basic tenets of project planning, budgeting, resourcing, scheduling, delivering, monitoring and evaluation. Or, as we prefer to put it, the why, what, who, how and what next.

Get as many people to proof read this (use google docs or wikis to avoid too many bouncing emails) and certainly involve as many stakeholders as possible in making sure it adds up, not just in terms of money but also in terms of what you need to do, how you want to do it, and how the funding will help your organisation both in the short-term but especially in the long-term. This is one of the most important things to grasp: you may not ever get another grant or funding from any source, in fact some funders don’t necessarily want you to start relying on them; most have targets around accessing new applicants, and all of them know that their investments will be seen to have made have more of an impact if they are equitably distributed to many different geographical areas, different types of group, different ages, different aims, different numbers of people.

Which brings us back to MediaSnackers. We try and work on projects and with organisations and people that want to use social media to remove barriers, improve communications, be transparent and commit to enabling staff and participants or audiences engage with social media to have their say, reach more people, develop communities of interest and change their services, making them easier, better and cheaper. Employees with creative new ITC skills and awareness that are enjoyable, innovative and can be used in both their professional and personal lives.

Change is scary (especially to management) so they might not be changes in a big way (although, don’t get us wrong, we like revolutionary zeal) but , wholesale or piecemeal, in a way that makes things smarter and easier to measure. Which is why we get so much work and have such a great client list and a brilliant reputation. That’s not a boast, it’s a fact. A fact we can prove with a wealth of archived evidence. Narrative, audio and video testimony. Numbers of people who read our blog posts. People who follow our tweets and piggy back on our Delicious stream etc.

So that’s why we think we make a great partner and why our approach is an asset to your funding application. We have the track record and a super-fuelled website allowing prospective funders to quickly assess our pedigree, expertise and versatility. We ask only three things:

• Let us know. We won’t take very kindly to hearing we’re scheduled to do training in Chester when we’re already booked in Chicago. We won’t necessarily be able to block out dates in case you get your funding, so be flexible with dates. Funders should understand this. The best projects change and develop after funding is granted. Of course they should. Not so they barely resemble what you wrote in your bid. Or you’re in trouble. But you should be able to re-plan to check every aspect of what you want to do, is the timing still correct or have you learnt something since your bid was written (often a timescale of up to three months) or do you have to re-address the commitment of partners or the cost of resources? We find it easy to quote our fee based on simple information. Please do check with us though, we have to pay the rent and our fees are what we are worth.

• We are quite happy for you to mention specific projects we have undertaken. If you’re a theatre, you’ll find examples of our projects in the performing arts by searching on our website. What we don’t think we should have to do it to re-write what we have done and achieved. It’s already there, on our website, available to all. With testimony, dates and rates at the click of a button. In the past we have sat down on steering groups and painstakingly ‘fitted’ our services to a specific bid. This didn’t rock our world and we don’t think it’s the best use of our time. Which is why our website does it for us. If it doesn’t, let us know. But please do your homework, it’s your bid and project/event and you own it.

• Please play nicely. We have a reputation that we’re very proud of, without this we would be much less and probably would just go back home and get proper jobs. But people seem to like us. So please bear this in mind. We have minimal overheads and maximum impact. And we’re more than happy to go up against other companies or agencies for jobs. But we won’t trek off to London at our own expense to plead for a contract. We don’t need to. If we need to represent, we prefer to chat on Skype. More green, more lean, can be seen and just as keen.

All this being said, we’re open, fluid and would love to discuss and embellish anyone bidding for some funds as their social media provider/partner. Feel free to contact us direct to start the adventure and we hope you found this helpful.

Written by Matt, our Cultural Bod

Related stuff : check out the Arts Funding Network plus the conversation around #artsfunding on Twitter.

Author: DK - 16/08/10