Where’s your next grant coming from? Insights from our justice, equity and digital funder audit
A 50% AI written blog based on my notes and an Otter.ai summary of a conversation with Jo Jeffery, bid writer at Full Circle. All AI content checked by a human.
This year we’ve been diving headfirst into some crucial work: understanding the shifting landscape of funding for charities and social justice organisations. With Jo Jeffery’s help we are conducting an audit of 3 types of funding opportunities:
- Programmes funding justice and equity focused work (from anti-racism to climate justice)
- Programmes funding digital work
- Funders who actively welcome applications for digital work
We’re doing this with the aim of making the audit data available in early March.
🌀 Broader changes to funders 🌀
Before we share more about our progress, here’s a summary of Jo’s work tracking broader changes to UK funders in 2024, via The List:
Spending out
A significant number of trusts are in “spend out” mode, meaning they are intentionally using up their endowments and closing down. Reasons cited include the trustees retiring, a desire to address urgent needs like the climate crisis, or a philosophical shift away from traditional philanthropy.
Restructuring
Many funders are restructuring their grant-making strategies, often in response to increased demand, a desire for greater impact, or a change in priorities. This often involves narrowing their focus, changing eligibility criteria, or pausing applications to develop a new strategy.
Pausing
A large number of funders have temporarily paused their grant programs. The main reasons given are being overwhelmed with applications, undertaking strategic reviews, or updating their processes. Many expect to reopen during 2025, but this is not guaranteed.
Closing early
Several funders closed application windows earlier than advertised due to high demand. This highlights the competitive funding landscape.
Closed doors: invitation-only programmes
A number of trusts have a policy of not accepting unsolicited applications, relying instead on trustee nominations or prior relationships. We’re seeing more and more of these. Foundations like Limelight, Porticus, Open Society, MacArthur Tech, Joseph Rowntree, and Disrupt often utilise this approach. This trend creates an uneven playing field. It can be difficult for smaller organisations or those without established networks to get a foot in the door.
Some trusts stepping up, application processes overwhelmed
Interestingly, we’ve also observed some UK-based trusts and foundations becoming more proactive in their funding efforts. However, due to the large number of funders pausing this is creating a bottleneck. The increased demand is overwhelming application processes, making it even harder for organisations to secure the support they need.
You can read more about Jo’s findings in her August 2024 article ‘On golden ponds’.
🔍 Insights from our audit: 85 opportunities and a maze of challenges 🔎
Back to our current audit of funding opportunities. We’re using tags in Airtable to categorise funders by focus areas like digital, equity, inclusion, and social justice. Our plan is to make this information public in March 2025.
Capturing open, closed and invitation-only opportunities
Our initial sweep identified 85 potential funding opportunities. Sounds promising, right? However, a significant number of these are invitation-only, particularly in the social justice and equity sectors.
This presents a real challenge.
While it’s tempting to focus solely on open calls, we recognise the importance of capturing all potential funding sources, including invitation-only and even those currently closed to applications.
Why?
Because knowing where the money could come from is valuable for future strategy and relationship-building.
The information challenge: many funder websites are difficult to navigate
Accessing clear, up-to-date information about funding opportunities is a constant battle. Many funder websites are difficult to navigate, and eligibility criteria are often vague. We’ve all experienced the frustration of digging through poorly designed websites, searching for that one piece of information that determines whether an application is even worth pursuing.
Ethical funding: a complex consideration
We’re also grappling with the ethical dimensions of funding. How do we assess funders based on their investments and ethical criteria? Balancing ethical considerations with the practical realities of funding is a delicate act. Finding a return on ethical investments can be challenging, and funders’ portfolios often have a significant impact on their ethical standing. We believe it’s important to understand where the money comes from and where it goes.
We’re testing an ethical funding framework internally. We’ll write more about this after March.
⏩ Moving forward: collaboration and transparency ⏩
We aim to make our audit data available for public use in early March, then keep it updated for a few months while we monitor its use. Maintaining such a resource requires ongoing effort and funding, but we believe it could be a valuable tool for grassroots organisations.
