As we approach the closure of Investing in Communities, we’d like to tell you more about the development of our plans for Lottery funding from late 2015. It has been a while since our last blog update on this, but in that time we have been soaking up continuous feedback about the way we work in Scotland and how we could do things better in the future.

From local events, to discussions with our customer reference panel, to ongoing conversations between you and staff at the Big Lottery Fund in Scotland, all of this feedback is playing a really important role in shaping up our plans.

It’s impossible to highlight everything that you’ve suggested, but a few things stand out as being particularly important to people: a wider range of grant sizes, simpler and proportionate processes, broader outcomes and better opportunities to network and collaborate with your peers.

The introduction of our new Strategic Framework offers a brilliant opportunity to respond to a lot of this feedback and more!

Over the next few weeks we’ll be sharing information about plans to place our resources in the service of people and communities across Scotland. To support this, we will be changing the way that we work to have more of a focus on ‘place’. This will allow us to improve our understanding of different communities and effectively oversee competition for scarce resources.

When we are assessing proposals we will be placing more importance on how they link and add to the work of others in an area. To support this, we’ll be collecting information about places, talking to people and building stronger relationships with local contacts. We’ll also ask the people we work with to foster and demonstrate strong, positive connections with those around you.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this! Do you have any concerns about demonstrating how your work fits with what’s going on around you? Could the Big Lottery Fund do something in particular to support you with this?

Please share your views with us at Scotland.2015.portfolio@biglotteryfund.org.uk

You can follow the journey to our new portfolio by subscribing to bigblogscotland.org.uk@Bigscotland.

You can also leave comments at the bottom of this blog.