At Friends Provident Foundation, our grant giving – alongside the active management of our endowment – is central to how we work towards our mission . But we know that, for you, applying for funds can be a lengthy and time-consuming process and we appreciate the amount of work that applicants invest in making an application.
That’s why we’re making changes to our process.
The application process is two-stage: the first stage is a short outline which lets us check if an idea is a good fit with our programme without asking applicants to put together a detailed submission. We are looking for applications we feel have potential for significant systems-level impact, raise new or interesting ideas or test new approaches that could create a model or learning that is applicable elsewhere. Until recently our stage one applications were reviewed by our Trustees at their quarterly meetings. But over recent years the number of applications we’ve received have increased significantly, stretching the capacity our Trustees have to offer.
So, from now on we will be doing things differently. Applications at stage one will be reviewed by our Programme Advisory Group – a group of experts who provide us with comment and critique on our stage one applications – rather than our Trustees. A panel of staff members will then review the applications and decide which should be invited to stage two. Where a stage one application is particularly novel, is of an unusually high value, is in a new policy area for us or is for core funding, it will still be sent to our Trustees for review.
As our Trustees will no longer be regularly involved in the review process, we have more flexibility on our timelines. And we will no longer have deadlines for our first stage applications. Applications can be submitted at any point in the year and will be reviewed on a rolling basis. We hope that by removing the ‘cliff edge’ this will result in a smoother and faster decision-making process for you, when applying to us for a grant.
Is there anything else we can do to make applying easier? Just let us know.