Great giving

We have just launched our Great Giving campaign with four core objectives which we will be building on over the coming months.

And those four objectives are:

• A clear picture of the funding environment
• Accessible funds for campaigning
• No more small print, and
• No ineligible applications

Over the next two years, through a series of pieces of work, we will identify, establish and promote key tenets of Great Giving so that they can be shared, discussed and adopted by many different funders.

The Funders’ Almanac is a crucial piece of work for DSC, and one which we intend to build on over the coming years, and is very much the cornerstone of our first objective – a clear picture of the funding environment.

The amounts of funding in the sector are changing constantly, and we have seen major shifts in how statutory funding is allocated and distributed over the last few years. The problem is that there is no hard data to show exactly how it has changed, how much it has changed by, or who has been most affected.

We aim to fill some of those gaps with our existing data, work to gather the information we need to fill in the biggest gaps, and then make that information available to funders and the wider voluntary sector.

Our second objective of accessible funds for campaigning stems from a piece of research we carried out with NCVO called “Funding for Sustainable Change” [pdf document]. Following this project we have committed to improving access to funding for campaigning. We’ll be doing this largely by making information from funders who may fund campaigning more explicit and easier to access.

‘No more small print’ is about ending the frankly appalling practice many funders have of allowing applicants to go through the entire application process before being presented with the terms and conditions, making it very difficult to challenge or negotiate them.

We’ll be releasing our research findings early in the New Year which will quantify the scale of the problem as well as identifying the worst and most prolific offenders.

The fourth and final objective is no ineligible applications. No mean feat I’m sure you’ll agree, but we’re up for a challenge. We’ll be carrying out a major research exercise in parallel to our ongoing work to identify not only the volume of ineligible applications that are made to funders, but also the underlying reasons for it – both from a funder and an applicant perspective.

Now we know we have set ourselves a big task here, but we are acutely aware of the hugely positive impact achieving our objectives will have on the sector.

As you all know, there are tough economic times ahead. Everyone, funders and the funded alike are going to need to do more with less.

What we are hoping to achieve through our Great Giving campaign is to change what we see as key areas of grant making that can be improved – simply and with great impact.

Keep an eye out on our website www.dsc.org.uk  for regular updates on the campaign as it progresses.