How do I work out what a funder is really asking for?

England and Wales: This page sets out the position in full. Scotland: the same position, with no difference in principle — this page is about how UK-wide funders assess applications, and none of the funders quoted applies a different test by nation. Northern Ireland: the same position, for the same reason.

Which funders publish why they reject applications?

Of the eleven biggest UK grant funders surveyed for this guide, only two publish anything usable about success rates or rejection reasons. Esmée Fairbairn and BBC Children in Need. The rest publish neither.

This page assumes you have already checked eligibility properly before writing anything. Decoding the criteria of a funder you cannot apply to is the most expensive kind of careful reading.

That matters for anyone reading funding criteria, because of what follows from it.

A charity asking “what are my chances?” cannot get an answer from most funders. And any website quoting a sector-wide grant success rate is quoting something nobody measured. This guide does not publish one, and you should treat any figure you meet elsewhere as an estimate with no source under it.

A funder’s own research adds a second-order finding. Garfield Weston commissioned a survey of its unsuccessful applicants and published the result about itself. Only 36% rated its reasoning clear — and that was below the benchmark average of 42% across 13 other funders. The sector is not good at explaining rejections, and it knows.

What to do when a rejection does come is covered when you handle rejection and ask for feedback.

Where applications fail: Esmée Fairbairn’s published funnel

Esmée Fairbairn publishes the only complete application funnel found anywhere in this survey, and its shape is not what most applicants expect. An expression of interest is the short first-stage form a funder uses to decide which applicants to invite to the next stage. The table shows the share that passes each stage.

Read the first row and the third row together. The first screen throws out most of what reaches it. The last stage funds almost everything that reaches it. The screen at the front is where applications die.

Most applicants do the opposite. The short form feels like a formality and the long proposal feels like the real test, so the careful work goes into the proposal. On these figures, that is backwards. The expression of interest deserves the same care as the bid, because it is the bid that matters.

One caution about reading across. This is one funder’s funnel, published by that funder about its own process. It is not a sector figure and it should not be treated as one. What generalises is the shape of a two-stage process, not the percentages.

BBC Children in Need’s most common rejection reason: governance

BBC Children in Need publishes the reasons projects are not funded, and the most common is not about the project at all:

not meeting the Minimum Standards for Grantmaking — safeguarding, governance, finance — the most common reason an application is not even assessed

Note the last four words. Not rejected on the merits. Not assessed at all.

The other published reasons run in a similar direction:

• weak evidence of the difference made to children, insufficient disadvantage criteria, or insufficient inclusiveness or consultation
• organisational capacity, financial viability, or unsecured match funding
• weak project planning or budgeting
• requests that are a statutory body’s responsibility

So the criteria document is only half of what a funder is asking for. The other half is whether the charity looks like a safe place to put money. The safeguarding policy, trustee governance and financial controls are read before the project is. A gap in any of them can end the application before anybody has considered what you want to do.

The practical consequence is a change of order. Before you map your project onto the criteria, check the governance basics the funder screens on. They should be in place, with evidence you can produce on request. The policy list in the governance hub is where that work belongs, and it is worth doing once rather than in a panic per application.

How current is the BBC Children in Need page?

The BBC Children in Need rejection-reasons page is dated 26 April 2021 and sits on an archive URL. The funder’s current pages still link to it. It is published, and it may also be superseded.

Treat it the way this guide treats any archived document it relies on. It is useful and dated, and worth confirming with the funder if you are about to decide on the strength of it. Keep your own copy of what you read, with the date you read it. Then a later change to the page does not erase the basis of your decision.

The funding criteria map: criterion, evidence and source

The deliverable for this step is a table, not an essay. One row per criterion the funder states, in the funder’s own wording.

Against each criterion, three columns: what you will say, what evidence backs it, and where that evidence comes from. If a row has no evidence, you have found a gap while you can still do something about it. That is the whole point of doing this before drafting rather than during.

Two rows are worth adding even though no funder lists them as criteria.

One is for each governance basic the BBC Children in Need screen tests — safeguarding, governance and financial controls. Record the document and its adoption date. The other is for whether any part of what you are asking for is a statutory body’s responsibility. That is a published reason for refusal in its own right.

Then write the bid from the map. Every claim in the application should trace to a row, and every row should have somewhere it came from.

With the criteria map built, the first section you write from it is the need: write the need statement and evidence it.

Common mistake: putting the effort into the full proposal rather than the first stage

The proposal feels like the real test. Esmée Fairbairn’s published funnel says the opposite. A small share of eligible expressions of interest reach an assessment call, while almost all applications that reach full proposal are funded. The attrition happens at the front, so the front is where the care belongs.

Common mistake: failing on governance basics rather than on the project

Applicants focus on the cause, because the cause is what they care about. BBC Children in Need names its most common reason for not even assessing an application. The reason is failure to meet its Minimum Standards for Grantmaking — safeguarding, governance, finance. The project never gets read.

Worked example

Tollgate Youth CIO drafts an application to a funder that runs a two-stage process. It puts a couple of hours into the expression of interest. It blocks out most of a month for the full proposal it expects to be invited to write.

On the published funnel, that allocation is the wrong way round. The expression of interest is the stage that rejects most of what it sees; the proposal stage funds most of what reaches it. Tollgate rebalances, and spends the bulk of the time on the short form.

It also builds two rows into its criteria map before it starts writing. One is its safeguarding policy with its adoption date, and the other its financial controls policy with the same. Neither is a criterion the funder lists. Both are things the funder screens on before it reads about the youth club at all.