Open Funding Pilot

11 - 15 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 11.

1. Launched!

This week we launched the fund.

At the time of writing 7 organisations have been invited to apply. And 1 organisation has submitted an application for funding. Next week we’ll invite 20-something organisations.

Last week we were in pre-launch mode. Testing, talking, learning, adjusting, fixing, double-checking the form, the documentation, the email content, the assessor workflow and our touch points with IMT, DPO, RFI and other groups in SE.

In some cases those changes may become opportunities to make improvements in future work. But most of those changes are exactly what happens when you make things. As the service becomes more real, you learn a lot that you couldn’t anticipate at the start of the project. This is why it’s important for organisations to have both:

  1. faster feedback loops to discover new information and learning, and
  2. teams with the multi-disciplinary capabilities and the confidence to quickly respond to what those feedback loops reveal.

This is also why we say that a pilot with no delivery is no pilot.

The start screen of the 2024 Pilot Fund form

2024 Pilot Fund form - start screen

2. Key dates