Responding to Demand I: Upcoming Changes to Our Open Grants Programme

Here, we share the work we did in 2024 to help us manage increased demand: Organisational strategies are at the mercy of events.

The Covid pandemic blasted a hole through many five-year plans. Since we launched our Strategy in 2023, we’ve not had to deal with anything so dramatic, but we have seen demand for our Open Grants steadily rise beyond our expectations. Applications more than doubled between the beginning of 2023 and the end of 2024.

This increase affected our budget, our turnaround times, and our success rates – and we know these all negatively affect applicants to the Open Grants Programme. Some of the increased demand was predicted and is down to widened eligibility – for example, we now accept applications for digital infrastructure as well as for equipment, building projects, and vehicles. Our profile is also higher than it was, thanks to more outreach activity. But we also know that grant funders across the sector are seeing increased demand, and we believe that we are a part of this wider trend.

During 2024, we made some tactical changes to help manage demand: Crucially, our Trustees took the decision to increase the Programme’s budget for the year. We also introduced monthly and quarterly budget caps for the first time, and simplified some of our processes to ensure we could assess more applications.

But the increased demand also meant we had to turn down a greater proportion of applications than in previous years. For the first time, we used existing information from our application forms to prioritise some eligible applications and deprioritise others, knowing that some great projects would fall below the funding line. By the end of 2024 (and with some help from Modern Grantmaking), we knew we had to make some more strategic changes to provide the best guidance, and experience, for applicants and grantees.

We’re designing those changes now, and will share more about them in our next post. The Open Grants Programme will remain open during the design and implementation of those changes.

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