How to design a community grants programme

Whether you’re designing or relaunching a community grants programme, it’s important to align it with your aims. This will help you make decisions about why, who and
how to fund. Here are three things to consider:

1. Agree on the difference you want community grants to make. For example, the Roseworth Big Local partnership uses community grants to encourage activities focused on supporting older people and those with long-term health conditions.
   

   We are particularly interested in applications which encourage more activities and get more going on in the area; develop community spirit; encourage creativity; could lead to enterprise or bigger things.
   From the Roseworth Big Local community grants application form

2. Define what success looks like for your programme. For example, in Rastrick, short-term success is having more applications from groups they don’t currently engage with.
   

   It’s a good thing when we get applications that are obviously from people who have not applied for funding before … that’s what we want.
   Rastrick Big Local partnership member

3. Connect community grants to the themes and priorities in your plan, like local resilience, community cohesion, young people, green spaces or health and wellbeing. This will help align the kinds of things you fund with what your plan aims to do. For example, in Kingsbrook and Cauldwell, improving the confidence and capacity of residents to start, develop and run things locally was their main priority.
   

   … [we want to] support local people to do things themselves … build capacity in the area. Provide support for groups to develop and formalise. And provide support for people to continue Big Local beyond the end of the programme.
   Kingsbrook and Cauldwell Big Local, partnership member

   If you can clearly explain why you are distributing community grants, who to and how they can be used, it will be easier for local people to understand if they can apply. It will also be easier for partners to promote your programme through their networks.

• Why should you (or did you) create a community grants programme? How does
  it relate to your wider aims?
• What is the purpose of your community grants? What difference will they make?
• Who are you trying to reach?
• What types of activities do you want to fund?
• How much funding do you have to give out? How will you split it?
• What would ‘good’ look like?
•  If you already have a grant programme, what has gone well? What’s not working?
• What needs to be different? For example, grant application, reporting or decision-making processes; scale of funding; who you fund.

Learning about other grant programmes can help you define your own. For example, here’s a blog about how the Tudor Trust defined wellbeing grants and what they learnt. IVAR also ran a webinar wit Big Local areas on the What, how and why of community-led grant-making.

At the time of research, Kingsbrook and Cauldwell Big Local had welcomed several new members to their partnership and grant-making committee. They’d also just completed a community consultation to inform their new Big Local Plan. With new people and new priorities, they looked at their community grants afresh to see what they could be used for.

The grants committee discussed questions like ‘what are community grants for?’ and ‘what
does community activity look like?’ to help them design and run an accessible and fair
grant-making process.

They agreed that community grants should be given to projects that fit with the priority
areas in their new plan: ‘Future generations’, ‘Environment’, ‘Parks and green spaces’ and
‘Community’. Applications would have to demonstrate that they met three criteria:

1. Have community benefit
2. Support community action
3. Match one of the themes in their new plan

The grants committee became more confident in their decision-making as they were now
clear about the kinds of activities they wanted community grants to support and why. The who, what and how was clearly explained in updated documents and processes, and communicated clearly within the partnership and externally to applicants and partners.

Before you decide what your community grants should be for, it’s useful to carry out a needs assessment. This will help you understand what issues local people are facing and care about
most, as well as what existing activities, groups and organisations are already helping people or addressing local issues in your area. You can do this by:

• looking at data and statistics about your area (through websites like local.communityinsight.org or the Co-op’s Community Wellbeing Index)
• asking residents what they care about using surveys in-person or on local forums (like Facebook and NextDoor)
• doing a mapping exercise (see the example from Hateley Cross Big Local below)

Once you’ve identified gaps in services or local activities, you’ll know where you could focus your community grants. Refreshing this knowledge regularly means you can adjust the focus of your grants to have the most impact and reach groups you’ve never engaged with before.

The Big Local areas involved in this research were keen to receive applications from groups and individuals that had not applied before. Reaching people in need of support requires a mix of:

• community engagement through partner organisations, local networks and events
• strong messaging about who can apply, what grants can be used for and how to apply
• communication and awareness-raising through different channels, for example, a webpage, social media and posters and flyers in community spaces.

Another way to engage and include specific groups is to invite them to join your grant-making committee, or ask local people, groups or organisations to test your application process.

Check out mycommunity.org.uk for practical guides, ideas and tips on engaging local people in your area, or find out more about our bespoke community engagement support here.

Hateley Cross Big Local wanted to understand how COVID-19 had affected community-based activities and services available to local people, and to identify where the gaps were. They did some research to help them reconnect with what was going on, to help them build new relationships and to distribute community grants to respond to local needs.

They mapped local activities and services which revealed a community hub that had recently opened. The hub hosted more than 75 local groups and organisations who could benefit from a community grant. Hateley Cross used this knowledge to build a relationship with the community hub and the organisations that use the space to encourage them to apply for community grants.

Hateley Cross will revisit this mapping exercise regularly because they have realised their community changes all the time in terms of needs, interests, demographics, local activities and spaces.

Rastrick Big Local wanted to attract residents who they had never engaged with before to apply for their community grants. They realised that their website was confusing, so redesigned it to make it more user-friendly and interactive, by reducing text and deleting confusing language.

They included information about the purpose of community grants, what had been funded before, and the application and decision-making process. The website also included images and quotes from funded partners to help inspire potential applicants. As not everyone is online, they also put up posters and flyers in community hubs, shared spaces and at local events.

• What groups and services already exist in your community?
• Who are you already reaching and who would you like to reach? Does this reflect the
  breadth of your community? Who is missing?
• What community engagement approaches have worked in the past?
• What might you need to do differently to reach new groups?
• Are there any local groups or organisations you could connect with to help you reach
  new groups?
• Are there local people – perhaps working in organisations or volunteering for groups you
  struggle to reach with community grants – who might want to join the partnership or
  grants committee?

Check out mycommunity.org.uk for practical marketing guides, ideas and tips,
including making your communications inclusive and accessible. Or find out more about our bespoke communications offer and sign-up here.

Rastrick Big Local partnership want their community grants to help local people turn new ideas into action. Ideally, they want to support groups they have not funded before. They recognise that encouraging new ideas means that the partnership has to be comfortable supporting people with activities that are not tried and tested.

The partnership understood that some funded activities might not achieve as much as others, or lead to lasting change in the community. They accepted these risks because one of their key priorities is to build an applicant’s confidence and skills through the funding process. They believe that the experience, skills and knowledge gained by applying for funding is as important as the project funded.

Your grant-making process should help you make decisions in an informed way. The following questions can help your grant committee explore its risk appetite in relation to your goals and aspirations.

It’s important to create grant processes that will give you enough information to judge fairly. But they should be proportionate to the size and purpose of the grant. If you ask too much of your applicants, they won’t bother applying.

• What does risk mean to you? For example, are you worried about: project failure; organisational failure; fraud; reputational damage; time; cost; excluding groups?
• How will you judge how to balance benefit and risk?
• How could you manage these risks while keeping the application and reporting process proportionate to the size of the grant and nature of the work?
• When assessing applications:
  • Is the project or idea achievable?
  • Does the project have the right amount of people to deliver it?
  • Can you support applicants, or can you point them in the direction of someone else who can?

In 2020, IVAR asked five foundations – of different scales, purposes and ways of working – to share their varied approaches to risk in grant-making. Their research report includes a risk framework for you to explore how comfortable your grant committee is with risk.

• Are application forms accessible to the whole community in terms of language and format? For example, think about people who may not have English as a first language, who may find prefer another method to written applications.
• Do you receive applications from different parts of the community? If not, who are you not hearing from and why not?
• What additional support are you able to provide to first-time applicants or those with specific needs?

IVAR’s Open and Trusting grant-making initiative supports, shares and champions learning on how to make grantmaking processes more simple, accessible and meaningful. Over 100 grant-makers have signed up to their eight commitments to funding charities in an open and trusting way.

• Is the process for making applications clear and available?
• What information do you really need? What do you use?
• What might need changing in your grants documents? For example, the application; guidance notes; terms of reference; budget template.
• Is the language accessible and inclusive?
• Is the amount of information you are asking for, and the length of your application, appropriate to the size of the grant?
• What information do your partners need? For example, if they are making the grant payment on your behalf.

The Plain English Campaign has lots of free guides to help you simplify your language, to make it easier to understand.

CharityComms.org.uk has a great introductory guide to accessible communications, from using alt-text on images to making your website easy to navigate.

Radstock and Westfield Big Local have developed an innovative way of making small grants through their Dragon’s Den approach. Individuals and small groups with new ideas are invited to pitch for funding at an annual event open to the community. Attracting up to 200 people, 20 applicants present their ideas for a chance to win one of ten £500 grants. Applicants must link their ideas to one of Big Local’s priorities and must demonstrate community benefit.

Voting rules apply, with all attendees required to place five votes. This prevents large groups from swinging the votes. It’s a great opportunity for local groups to showcase their ideas and get support. Even if they don’t win, it’s about ‘letting people know you’re out there’ and potentially learning about ‘other pots of money available’. And for Radstock and Westfield Big Local, it helps them engage more local people with their main priorities.

• Who makes grant decisions?
• Who else could you invite to be involved in deciding who receives grants?
• How do you deal with conflicts of interest when assessing community grant applications?
• How can you separate grant support from grant decision processes?

The Directory of Social Change has a comprehensive Guide on the Principles of Good Grant Making.

• How do you use the information and feedback gathered for measuring change?
• Are you asking for additional data you do not need or use?
• What information does your funding partner need to do
  their checks?
• How are you feeding back lessons learnt or successes to
  funded groups?

We can offer your partnership bespoke support to measure the change you’re making.

NCVO also has an extensive library of free resources to help you measure impact and set up an evaluation process.

If you need additional support, the following sources can help you explore the ideas in this toolkit further:

• MyCommunity.org for crowdsourced resources, toolkits and advice from across the third sector
• Your local Council for Voluntary Service
• Your local Community Foundation

• Get in touch with Local Trust to find out how our current support partners can help you with grant-making training, measuring your impact and more at support@localtrust.org.uk or call us on 020 3588 0423.
• Speak to your Big Local area advisor, area coordinator or Locally Trusted Organisation anytime about your support options.
• You will find Big Local partnership members and volunteers sharing their experiences, challenges and successes on Workplace, where Local Trust also publicises training, networking events, conferences and useful resources.