Success Rates – Autumn 2018
Thinking about applying to us for funding and wondering what your chances for success are? The best way to find out the likelihood of being awarded funding is usually to get in touch and chat to us about your idea! However, we also like to give you an idea of how busy or competitive our funds are in general, so this blog post will give you a breakdown of our current success rates for the last six months up to 30th September 2018.
Before we do that, we wanted to let you know that our current average success rate for applications across all of our funds is just over 40%. This is because we always receive more good applications than we have money to fund, and are currently getting even more requests than usual – so competition for our grants is very high right now!
£15m Digital Fund launches
Digital Buddies
We’re excited to open our new Digital Fund today to offer dedicated digital funding support to voluntary and community groups across the UK!
The £15 million Digital Fund will run for two years and will award grants of up to £500,000. The first phase is open to applications from today until 3 December 2018 and has two funding strands:
- Digital Pioneers – for established charities, with an income of over £500,000 per year, that want to use digital to take a major leap forward;
- Digital Natives – for more recently-established organisations that are successfully using digital, but now need help scaling this up.
This first phase is specifically about accelerating and upscaling existing digital services. However, in the New Year, we’ll also be announcing how the Digital Fund will help build digital skills within smaller organisations.
Wondering how you can get involved or interested in applying? Here’s what you need to know:
We’re coming to your community – Autumn & Winter 2018
Interested in applying to us for National Lottery funding to make a difference in your community? We’ll be at a number of events across Scotland over the next few months, where you can chat to us about your ideas and get advice on applying.
This includes running joint funding advice sessions in Glasgow, Dumbarton and Edinburgh with the Corra Foundation, another major funder in Scotland, which will offer you the chance to meet both funders on the same day and in the same place.
We’ll also be present at funding fairs and larger conferences where you will be welcome to speak to us about what activities you’re hoping to carry out in your community.
The events are listed below, and shown on the interactive map along with details of how to get involved. Just click on the relevant map marker for more information!
Challenge poverty? Aye we can!
Challenge Poverty Week is upon us! To mark it, we wanted to show how our Delivering Financial Inclusion programme, which is funded jointly by the European Social Fund and National Lottery players, is supporting the most vulnerable people across Scotland to improve their money management skills and reduce debt.
Financial worries are common in many households across Scotland, but can be particularly difficult for lone parents, people experiencing unemployment and those on low incomes.
Our programme helps to tackle poverty by supporting people with these money pressures in Argyll & Bute, Dundee, Inverclyde, Glasgow and North Ayrshire, by providing them with benefits and debt advice, money management skills, and fuel and energy consultations.
As it’s Challenge Poverty Week, we’d like to show how these services are working in practice by taking a closer look at how people have benefitted from the I:DEAS service, provided by Inverclyde Council and its delivery partners.
As I discussed in a recent blog piece, involving your community in planning and delivering your work is important if you are looking to get a grant from us, especially through National Lottery Awards for All.
This time we’ll look at some cases where involving the wider community could be more difficult, or a bit outside of your organisation’s normal role. So let’s start with the commonest question:
What if we don’t or can’t work with the wider community?
When you are doing more sensitive work we realise that it can be difficult to work with your community in the widest sense. This could be the case for projects doing things like counselling around sensitive issues, or work with vulnerable groups.
However, for most other groups we are keen to see how you will involve and be open to input from the wider community, not just the people currently involved in your activities (although their views are important too!). Because of this, projects that only benefit your organisation’s existing users or members are typically less likely to be funded.
This can be an issue for some types of organisation in particular.
