Open Funding Pilot

30 October - 3 November 2023

As a reminder, we are a team from Sport England and FF Studio working together on the Open Funding Pilot.

It will help Sport England try new ways of working and new funding models to enable them to get more people in underserved communities active. It will also show the wider Sport England organisation what delivery looks like if we shorten feedback cycles.

Weeknotes are a quick recap of the important things a team has done each week, what we’ve learned, and what’s the plan for next week. They also help us work in the open.

Two big things and one small this week.

1. User research.

We met with 3 sports organisations (aka grantseekers) and one sports funding organisation. There is nothing like watching someone talk as they use your form to reveal things that need fixing and new opportunities.

Loads of interesting insights. The top 3:

1. We need to be clearer about what the fund is for from the start - reducing inequalities. This will help grantseekers tailor their application and makes the questions across the form easier to answer. “At this point, I actually don’t know what it is that you are trying to fund. … I would want to obviously tailor my answer to the project.”

2. Some of our questions are deliberately open. These need clearer guidance on why we ask them, what a good answer looks like, and what we don’t need to see. We wanted to test how organisations would respond if we took off all the guardrails, and we learned that some guidance is helpful. “Through familiarity with grant applications, I know what sort of answer you’re looking for there. But for somebody who’s never done an application before, I’d be thinking, what on earth do we need to put in here?”

3. The funding process doesn’t always match the reality of grantseekers work, as it expects everything from budget to idea is fully worked out before they start. Finding ways to increase flexibility for organisations makes a big difference. “Like, for us to have that [funding], … has made such a difference to us as an organisation. We would not be where we are right now if it wasn’t for that type of funding.”

Screenshot of analysis board with research notes categorised by theme and our next steps

2. The value of working in the open, and maybe some replanning

We took our current prototype out for some show and tells with broader audiences in SE. We’re four or five weeks in, and other teams in SE have been working on similar things for a lot longer. So we want to share our thinking and learn from what other people are doing too. Working in the open like this is so important, especially when you’re working in fast cycles - not least because it helps us to de-risk any misunderstandings that crop up along the way.

Monday was the Open Funding team and Nick Pontefract. Thursday (yesterday) was the RFI team: Greg, Ed, Jo. Yesterday we found some gold.

Our project (Open Funding Pilot) aims to help SE try new ways of working and experiment ahead of Open Funding proper in April 2024. It also aims to deal with The List. It is a temporary, limited funding programme that covers a time gap between now and April 2024 when Open Funding launches, and a size gap between small and strategic partners.

We started the project with the belief that organisations on the List needed answers before Christmas. So we’ve optimised for speed, quick delivery, crunchy deadlines and minimal disruption to (and resource expenditure from) the rest of the SE org.

One of our early decisions had been to limit funding size to £250,000 on the basis that it is aligned to Open Funding and minimises:

Time needed by assessors Size of governance overhead and audit required Additional reporting or contracting costs

In our show and tell Greg, Ed and Joanne from RFI added some new insight:

It’s likely that some grantseekers on The List will want more than £250k. Christmas might be less important than we previously thought

So, we are digging into exactly how many might want more than £250k (it could be less than 10 - but we will find out), and what the cost, risk or other implications of moving the Christmas deadline and £250k limit is.

We’ll try to write up what we find in our next weeknote.

Other questions came up too

Other questions came up - we always welcome questions and feedback.

• How do we think applicants will respond to the tight timelines?
• How do we balance remaining focused and fast with a more coordinated approach across SE?
• Is it preferable to bring peers into the assessment process to reduce bias?

All very helpful questions, rest assured we are thinking about them. Would love some replies on what has been done before and worked.

Next week:

Three things which pull in different directions:

• Iterating our prototype based on research findings and readying it for our first applicants.
• Drafting a very clear scope and plan on what makes the December deadline achievable.
• Drafting an alternative plan which also makes above £250k funding applications possible.

Previous week notes are here