Flexibility comes in different shapes and sizes
Today we thought we'd share some examples of unusual flexibility that have caught our eyes in the last few months. These are flexible funding practices that go beyond unrestricted grants.
Flexibility at the Postcode Lottery
Grantseekers like to win grants, but they don’t always want to look too flush.
Sometimes applicants know that if their accounts show too much money then they will become ineligible for potentially valuable grants elsewhere. This can be both due to formal eligibility restrictions, and also because of the sense that some funders have that "this organisation has enough money already".
So we were interested and pleased to hear of a
policy at the Postcode Lottery which allows organisations that have won multi-year grants to specify when they want to get the money within the three years. Do you want less in year 1 and more in year 3? No problem.
This policy is specifically to help out grantees facing these bank-balance dilemmas, and we think it’s nice and sensitive to the struggles of people who work in charities.
Flexibility at the Wellcome Trust
Grant applicants who have disabilities or other long term health conditions might not be feeling able to either apply or delivery work at the moment that a grant window is open.
The Wellcome Trust understands this and has a special page on their site which lays out various forms of support for these types of applicants.
One of these measures is the ability to defer an in-progress application to the next round, when an applicant might be more able to succeed. Again, we think this is nicely considerate, and speaks of an organisation that has discussed the needs of their applcants with care.
Flexibility at the William Grant Foundation
Most funders ability to be flexible stops at the application form: you normally need to fill in the standard form even if you do nothing else.
However at the William Grant foundation this isn't required. As they say on
their website, "We will accept a copy of an application written for another funder if it is current and relevant to the funding opportunity."
Furthermore, at the other end of the grants process, they will accept progress or evidence reports written for other funders as a baseline, and use an organisation's own annual report for unrestricted grants rather than requiring a separate document.
Have you seen any example of flexibility in grantmaking that are a bit unusual? Drop us a line at hello@moderngrantmaking.com
