Tag Archives: funding

Deep Dive: The Complete Guide to Grant Readiness — A Masterclass for Small Charities

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How one grassroots charity turned three years of rejections into £13,500 in eight months — and what your organisation can learn from it.

Sarah’s Frustration

Sarah is a dedicated trustee of Oakdale Community Sports Hub, a grassroots charity with a £250,000 annual turnover. She joined the board three years ago after volunteering as a coach for their youth football programme. While she works full-time as a primary school teacher, she dedicates her evenings and weekends to helping the Hub thrive.

Oakdale runs multiple community sports programmes from a modest facility they’ve gradually improved over their 12-year existence. They’ve created a vibrant space where local children and adults can access affordable sports activities. The sessions are packed, the testimonials are glowing, and the community impact is obvious to anyone who walks through the door.

But the organisation is perpetually caught in a financial balancing act.

(A quick note: Yes, Oakdale turns over £250k—but if your charity is working with £25k, £50k, or £100k, this guide is absolutely for you. In fact, it might be even MORE important for smaller organisations, because you’re often competing against larger, better-resourced charities for the same pots of money. Everything in this guide scales down perfectly. The principles don’t change whether you’re managing £25k or £250k—you just need fewer trustees and simpler systems. Don’t skip this thinking it’s not for you. It is.)

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Beyond the Cliff-Edge: Practical Steps for Long-Term Funding in Small Charities

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Read time: 8 minutes

Last month, Sarah opened an email that started with: “We regret to inform you…” Another grant rejection. That was supposed to cover coaching costs for the next year. Without it, Oakdale Community Sports Hub had to dip into reserves—again. They’ve got three months’ breathing space, maybe four, before the treasurer starts sounding the alarm.

To make matters harder, their Sport England funding had just ended. They knew the rules: no chance of reapplying until the project was fully wrapped up. And even then, they’d be waiting months before hearing back. Best case, if they applied the day after their grant ended, it could still be five months before new funding landed in the bank. That left Oakdale staring at a gap of half a year or more with no guarantee of support.

Sarah and her charity are fictional, but their story mirrors what happens to real organisations across the UK every day.

If you’re involved with a grassroots group, chances are you’ve felt that same mix of relief when a grant comes in and dread when the next one’s uncertain.

If you’ve ever sat round a committee table with the bank balance dropping and volunteers looking worn out, you’ll know exactly how Sarah and her team felt. This isn’t bad management; it’s the reality of grant-reliant funding. The cliff-edge happens to the best of us. The question is: how do you build a bit more stability into the picture?

Let’s look at some practical, achievable steps that even a small volunteer-led committee can put into action.

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When to Walk Away: Declining Misaligned Funding

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Read time: 10 minutes

The £50,000 Decision That Nearly Broke Everything

Sarah and her charity are fictional, but their story mirrors what happens to real organisations across the UK every day.

When Sarah first saw the email offering £50,000 to her small community sports charity, she genuinely thought she’d won the lottery. Her organisation had been running youth football programmes in Manchester for three years on practically nothing—mostly small donations and brilliant volunteer coaches who believed in what they were doing. That funding would sort their immediate money worries and let them reach more young people.

Six months later, Sarah found herself sitting in a draughty community centre, fighting back tears as she tried to explain to her trustees how that ‘lifeline’ funding had nearly destroyed everything they’d built.

The grant had come with strings she hadn’t spotted in the excitement: reporting systems that ate up 15 hours every week, programme changes that completely put off their core community, and targets that forced them to chase numbers instead of nurturing the genuine relationships that actually made their work brilliant. By month four, two of her best volunteer coaches had walked away in frustration, and the young people they served were drifting off to hang about street corners again.

Sarah’s story plays out across Britain’s charity sector more often than we’d like to admit. Organisations everywhere are learning a tough lesson: not all funding is good funding.

And that’s a conversation we need to have.

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Grant Readiness Checklist: Is Your Small Charity Prepared?

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Read time: 6 minutes

Your charity does brilliant work. But when that perfect grant opportunity lands in your inbox, can you respond with confidence? Research shows 82% of successful applicants prepare their core documents well in advance—and there’s good reason for that.

Grant readiness isn’t about having a crystal ball. It’s about having the right foundations in place so you can move quickly when opportunities arise. And crucially, it’s about having all this information organised and accessible—whether that’s a physical folder system or a digital solution.

Consider using a tool like Evernote, Notion, Google Drive, or OneDrive. Personally, I use Evernote because its AI search function means I can find anything quickly—even when I’ve inevitably misfiled something. The key is having everything searchable and accessible from anywhere.

What’s brilliant about these platforms is that they’re all shareable across your organisation. You can give your whole team access to work collaboratively on documents, or set permissions so only certain people can edit while others can view. No more emailing documents back and forth or wondering who has the latest version.

There’s nothing worse than knowing you have that perfect case study somewhere but spending an hour hunting for it while a deadline looms. We’re all human—things get misfiled. But good systems with search functionality can be a lifesaver.

Here’s your practical checklist to get there.

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When the Odds Are 2%: Should You Apply?

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Seeing this screenshot really annoys me.

Picture this: you’ve found a funder that perfectly matches your client’s ethos, their work, and their goals. It’s a rare alignment of values and priorities, a golden opportunity—or so it seems. Then, you scroll down their website and see this:

Read more: When the Odds Are 2%: Should You Apply?

“We are currently receiving a high number of requests, which means the success rate for applicants is about 2%.”

You pause. The glow of possibility dims. Questions race through your mind. Why did they open the grant round at all? Why not close it early if demand is that overwhelming? And perhaps the most pressing question of all: is it even worth the charity’s effort to invest time, resources, and money into crafting a stellar application for this funder?

Let’s be honest: the grant application process isn’t quick or cheap. It takes a lot to write a compelling bid—gathering data, aligning your narrative to their priorities, and creating a budget that fits like a glove, and when the odds are as steep as 2%, you can’t help but wonder if the time spent could be better used elsewhere.

But here’s the rub: someone has to be in that 2%. Could it be you? If the funder truly aligns with your mission, the answer might still be yes, but, before diving in, weigh up the costs. Ensure the potential funding is really worth the effort and consider if there are alternative funders with better odds.

Because while a perfect match is rare, your resources are even rarer.

This post is part of my ‘No-Nonsense Nonprofit’ series. I’m Connie – consultant at Third Sector Support Solutions Ltd, where I help social sector organisations untangle the messy stuff and write bids that get funded. This blog lives on The Art of Stupidity – my honest, human space for sharing what I’ve learned in the field.