Shared due dilligence: how you can get involved

Streamlining the mechanics of grant making is important, because, as we never tire of saying, it costs civil society in the region of £900m per year to apply for funding. Large organisations spend about 5% of their resources on fundraising, and for small and equity-led organisations it can be closer to 20%. We’ve heard from civil society organisations that the gathering and uploading of key organisational documents is a significant part of this time. Funders must take steps to reduce these costs. Due diligence is one part of the process where there is potential to save time and money, both for applicants and for grant makers. 

Over the last 18 months, we’ve held roundtables, developed shared ambitions and principles, and surveyed members on their current practice. More than 20 members have participated to date, with a great mix of large and small, public, private and independent, local, regional and national. If you haven’t been involved so far, you are very welcome to join now!

Designing a pilot

In November we held the first (of three) co-design workshops to develop a pilot to run through the 2024-25 financial year.  The basic approach of the pilot will be that: 

• For applicants: key organisational information is uploaded once to an online platform (for all applications being made to the funders involved in the pilot). This reduces the time required to upload the same information across multiple applications. 
• For funders: whichever funder needs to review a grant application first, reviews the documents and records factual notes. The funder does not share their own assessment of risk or judgement on fundability, so no civil society organisation is ruled out by this process. Other funders are then able to review the summary facts without needing to do their own document review, thereby reducing the time required and duplication of effort for funders. 

The diagram below sets out the proposed process visually. 

What does a good pilot look like? 

The pilot will run for at least one year, with the proposed start date being April 2024.  There may be more than one pilot, running concurrently, for example, a pilot with a group of funders in a place, or a pilot focusing on a type of applicant or type of grant. If there is more than one pilot, they would all initially be designed and run in the same way, but the analysis of impact would differentiate between them. 

The first co-design workshop identified that the pilots should be deliberate and transparent, setting out clearly for both funders and applicants what we are testing. We’ll need to make the expectations and requirements of funders very clear as well as providing good communication to civil society applicants about the implications for them of applying to grants programme that is part of the pilot.  

For the pilot phase, we’re working with Superhighways, who will help us to design a simple online shared database. This will be an easy-to-use, safe and trusted platform which is GDPR compliant and cyber-resilient, and offers responsive support when either applicants or funders have questions. Funders would need to provide a link to this platform from their own application portals. 

Over the year we’ll be testing whether a shared approach reduces the burden on both applicants and funders, as well as exploring levels of trust between funders, whether risk or risk appetite is increased, and potentially whether a shared approach leads to a greater understanding of and confidence about the purpose and mechanics of due diligence across funders, applicants and the infrastructure organisations that support them. 

How you can get involved 

You can read our full proposal here on the development of a pilot. 

If you are interested in taking part, here's a link to a short survey which will ask you: 

• Where you fund (location)
• Who you are seeking to fund (types of organisation)
• The activities you fund 
• The size of grants you make
• The funding programmes you will have open from April 2024 – March 2025, when these will open and when grant decisions will be made
• How many applications you expect to receive for these funding programmes, and how many grants you are likely to make

We will use the analysis of this data to confirm the focus of the pilots. We’ll be looking to group funders together to ensure that there is a large enough pool of likely applicants shared between a number of funders to provide enough data to make the pilot feasible. 

The costs of the pilot will be shared equally between the funders taking part, and we’re hoping to keep this to under £5k per funder. The more members that participate, the cheaper the cost for each!

Co-designing the next stage 

We have two more co-design workshops scheduled in February, on the 1st and 21st. You can register to attend here.  You don’t need to have committed to the pilot to participate, and we’ll also be joined by civil society infrastructure organisations. 

If you’d like to talk more about the possibilities for your organisation, get in touch with Geraldine.