Eight Weeks. Forty Percent. And If It Doesn’t Work, That’s On You.

A client sent me a sales pitch a few weeks ago. She wanted to know if it was worth the money.

I read it twice. Once because I thought I’d missed something. Once because I wanted to be sure I was as angry as I thought I was.

Set up your CIC. Get funded by the National Lottery Community Fund. Eight weeks, start to finish. Forty percent success rate. Templates included.

Here is the first thing you need to know about that timeline.

At the time I’m writing this, the National Lottery Community Fund takes twelve to fourteen weeks minimum to give you a decision. Not to fund you. To answer you. The eight-week promise is already broken before they’ve opened your file. You cannot be funded in eight weeks by a funder who hasn’t finished reading your application yet.

I don’t know how that gets written down and sold with a straight face. But there it is.

The forty percent figure works harder than the timeline. It sounds credible. Nearly half of people who use this method get funded, that’s the implication. What it doesn’t tell you is which fund. Which stage. Which region. Whether those organisations had been operating for six months or six years. Whether they had delivery history, community evidence, established partnerships, or none of those things. Forty percent of what, exactly, under which conditions, for how much money.

Context-free statistics exist to sound like proof without functioning as proof. This one is doing exactly that job.

I know what these three gaps look like from the other side, because I used to be the one reading the applications. Ten years of it. You can tell within the first paragraph whether an organisation understands its own community or has borrowed someone else’s sentence structure to describe it. Weak evidence reads as weak evidence no matter how well the sentence is built around it. The templates that promise otherwise can’t fake that, and the assessors who mattered were never fooled by them anyway.

And buried in the small print, because there is always small print, is the disclaimer. If your application is rejected because your community evidence is weak, your social media presence is underdeveloped, or your partnerships aren’t solid enough, that’s not covered. That’s your fault. The template did its job. You didn’t do yours.

Read that again.

The three things cited in that disclaimer, community evidence, credibility, partnerships, are the three things funders weight most heavily when they assess an application. The disclaimer is not a caveat. It is an admission, written in legal language, that the templates cannot produce the thing that actually gets you funded. And if you didn’t already have that thing, and you bought this course because you didn’t know you needed it, the responsibility for your rejection has already been quietly transferred back to you.

That is not a course. That is a contract designed to make sure the money flows one way regardless of outcome.

I want to say something clearly about the people this is aimed at.

It is not aimed at well-resourced organisations with a grants manager and a track record and time to experiment. It is aimed at the ones running scared. The CIC that’s eight months in, doing genuinely good work, watching the reserves drain, and desperately needing something to move. The founder who built something real from nothing and cannot understand why the funding keeps not landing. The community organisation that has been told “have you tried grants?” by everyone they know and is now staring at a form that might save them.

Those are my clients. Those are the people who forward me the pitch and ask if it’s worth it. And those are the people who come back to me six months later with a rejection letter and feedback that says their application looked like it had been written by someone else.

It had. That’s what templates do.

There’s nothing wrong with being new to this. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to start a CIC, do something useful, and need funding to make the first project happen. That is exactly the right reason to exist as an organisation and I will never suggest otherwise.

But getting funded is not a template problem. It has never been a template problem. It is an evidence problem. Whether you can show a funder, in specific and credible terms, that your community needs this, that you can deliver it, and that people who matter locally are genuinely behind you. That evidence takes time to build. It takes honesty about where the gaps are. It cannot be bought for the price of a course, and it cannot be shortcut by someone else’s sentence structures.

My own intake process, discovery calls, needs analysis, planning conversations, evidence mapping, takes six weeks. With organisations that already exist. That already have delivery history. Six weeks before anyone writes a word of an application.

The pitch is selling the finished race in less time than I spend at the starting line.

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If you want to know where you actually stand before you spend a penny, start with the free Funding Readiness Check. Sixteen statements, five minutes, and an honest read on whether you’re ready to apply or still building the foundations.

Take the Funding Readiness Check — free

And if you’ve had a rejection that came back with comments about authenticity, or you already know roughly where the gaps are and want the actual groundwork laid out properly, that’s what I wrote Grant Ready for.

Download Grant Ready — £65
What funders actually need to see. How to know if you’re ready before you apply. Written by someone whose reputation sits on the outcome, not the sale.