4 - 8 December 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.
This is the end of week 10.
1. Turn it up to 11
Last week we said we were finding gaps, filling gaps, and getting ready to launch. This week is the same, but as you get closer to any service’s launch date, everything gets… sharper.
These are just some of the highlights this week:
- Decision from ELT: support £250,000 award limit, but over multiple years. This is now fixed in the grantseeker form.
- Decision: our approach to assessment design has been broadly signed off by IMT. We’ve made some adjustments to the assessor workflow and documentation, after feedback, and after a few more tweaks, IMT are happy. Final tests with some investment managers this week.
- Decision: We need to solicit the list formally. To do that they need to be in GMS first. RFI have helpfully adjusted their comms to ask that when orgs get in touch with us they share the info we need to get them into GMS. Our first batch was signed off and is being processed as we type.
- Decision: because of that we decided to use GMS’s unique reference number (URN) instead of email address as the “unique key” in the grantseeker form, so that we can more easily tie applications to existing records in GMS. This is now handled in the grantseeker form.
- Problem: Typeform can’t easily handle audio and video files that are larger than 10MB. This is now handled in the grantseeker form.
- We completed documentation of the application guidance (it is now with DPO for legal signoff). We also completed content for launch emails.
- We met with Nick. Because of some things that came up this week (see below), it wasn’t quite the “final Go/No Go meeting” we’d planned, but a useful sense check on where we are, what we’re doing, what the risks are. We proceed.
- We’ve received the first batch of organisations on the List from RFI.
2. Key dates
- Fund opens: 12 Dec 2023
- FF Studio team hand over to Sport England: 18 Dec 2023
- Fund closes for applications: 23 Jan 2024
Onwards to launch!