Open Funding Pilot

15 - 26 January 2024

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 16.

Closing the fund for applications

The fund closed on 23 Jan 2024 as planned.

The numbers:

• 43 of 70 orgs completed Expression of Interest and were invited
• 11 explored an alternate route
• 36 orgs submitted application - most of them on the penultimate day
• 30 orgs emailed or had calls
• 2 missed the deadline due to email issues

Image: a graph of application volumes by date, taken from Typeform’s statistics. Most submissions came in just before the deadline.

5 things we learned in the last week of applications

We’ve learned many things running the fund. Here are 5 from the last week:

Evidence that being able to save and resume an application is important

Early on, we believed that being able to save and resume an application form would be useful to applicants. The evidence is in:

Image: statistics on the views and drop off per page of the form.

“Drop off” rates are when the applicant leaves the page and doesn’t return. You can see here drop-off is higher for the very first page and the URN question. Without more research, we don’t know exactly why, but we can make some guesses: Organisations click the link to check that the form is there but don’t intend to apply there and then. Organisations pause at the URN question (perhaps to go get the URN from their email, and get dragged into other work).

That first page of the form had 259 views from 43 organisations, so we know organisations will open a form several times. So it’s important that forms allow organisations to save and resume applications.

Documents feel safe: organisations fall back to documents when they’re confused

• 2 organisations didn’t know there was an application form, and were preparing answers in a document.
• 3 organisations found financial information too hard to put into the form, and sent a document as a supplement.
• 1 organisation didn’t see everything they expected in the form summary, so also sent a document “just in case”.

Now we don’t know whether this observation would still hold at larger scale - it may reflect how these organisations are used to communicating with Sport England. More is research needed. But there are opportunities for us to be even clearer in our user interfaces, and make financial information easier to submit.

Feedback and winning funding are themselves a feedback loop

We have asked the 43 invited organisations for feedback. They can do it conveniently by emailing us or anonymously in a form. We are expecting to get useful insight.

However, feedback and whether you get funding are themselves a feedback loop: one respondent said “Am happy to provide more feedback but depending on how we get on will effect what I thought of the process!”

1 organisation applied 4 times for 4 ideas

One organisation applied 4 times for 4 ideas, for a total of £700,000+. This was a surprise, and shows us that we could have been clearer in our guidance documentation that we meant: only 1 organisation with only 1 idea, applying only 1 time for a maximum of £250,000.

But it raises an interesting question for longer-running or open-ended funds like Open Funding: over time organisations might legitimately have multiple good ideas that are deserving of funding. How do funds handle that?

4 organisations used audio/video answers

Four organisations used audio/video answers for the “What’s your idea and why does it matter?” questions. They were all for organisations that want to reach disabled communities. This is worth further research.

Assessment

Application assessment is starting. IMT have a team of 6 assessors with a range of experience. They’re “calibrating” together on a first assessment, then splitting into 2 teams of 3 assessors and assessing the 36 applications. We expect funding decisions to be complete by the end of February.

FF’s final fortnight

Next week, the team from FF Studio starts its final fortnight on this project. Our focus is on closing well.

We’re working on our report, which will document what we did and lessons learned for organisations that want to tighten on their feedback loops.

We’re also completing our research. Organisations who were invited to apply for funding have been invited to give us feedback. How? Email us, or send us feedback however works best for you, or anonymously with a form. Next, some research on how we can support the assessor experience in future funds.