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By Adrienne Kelbie, Director of Operations, BIG Lottery Fund
A recent article in DSC’s enewsletter highlighted the difficulty that funders face in providing useful feedback to applicants who are rejected in high volume, competitive programmes.
At Big Lottery Fund, we have wrestled with this dilemma for many years, and are now striving to ensure that every applicant receives personal feedback about why we could not fund them.
During 2008/2009, we made 19,000 decisions on funding applications. We know that each and every one represents an emotional and financial investment by our applicants. And we know how disappointing, and sometimes frustrating, it can feel, when we have to say no.
In our new Strategic Framework, Big Thinking, we state firmly that we want to provide a more personalised customer service. We want to be a responsive and intelligent funder who adds value throughout the funding cycle in the quality of our communication.
DSC’s article highlighted comments from an applicant to the Young People's Fund who felt we had not provided helpful feedback, and we take this seriously. Your readers may appreciate some context.
Our Young People’s Fund used a two-stage process. We first invited Outline Proposals - expressions of interest. Where we felt that the project was one that we might be able to support, we invited the applicant to submit a full application. Applicants tell us that they value this approach as they do not have to invest too much in developing full proposals only to be rejected. This is an approach we use on several of our programmes.
When the full application was submitted, we checked whether there had been significant changes from the project described in the Outline Proposal. If there were, we rejected the application especially where the essence of the project had changed.
At this point, we would not have assessed all the information and were therefore unable to offer detailed feedback. We suspect that the application in your article was rejected at this point. It is, however, only when we receive the detailed proposal that we can fully understand the project.
We then assessed the eligibility of the project. Applicants tell us that at this stage, they prefer to hear our decision earlier rather than wait for us to review all of the information submitted. Again, this means that we were not able to give detailed feedback.
Finally, we assessed the remaining applications against our two assessment criteria – outcomes and delivery. We presented all remaining applications to our decision-making Committee, which has the difficult task of deciding between many good applications. For this programme the Committee considered 337 bids requesting over £104million against a total budget of £52million.
We have used the following approach on some programmes recently and intend to roll it out across all programmes in future.
- We telephone all unsuccessful applicants before we send them a letter. This opens up communication and allows for questions.
- We follow up with a tailored letter explaining why they have not been successful inviting the applicant to contact us for further feedback by telephone or visit. We also offer copies of the assessment reports that we present to Committee.
- In addition, we signpost applicants to helper agencies such as CVSs and LDAs, who can help them to improve future applications.
We have lots of evidence from applicants telling us that they find this approach very helpful. We want to promote a culture where we engage closely with applicants as we strive for continuous improvement and service excellence in this crucially important area. We are fully committed to offering all our customers a positive experience even when reluctantly we have to say no.