Money for old rope

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Richard McMann, head of investment and tourism at Arun District Council, explains how he mobilised community groups to go for Awards for All cash

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I organised the Awards for All Mass Form Filling Workshop because I felt that A4A offered small groups such a good opportunity to get their hands on funding support. Yet I was finding that groups were over-complicating the process – and the one thing I’ve always believed about A4A is that it’s not complicated. I tested the idea with a couple of groups and got a positive response. So I talked it over with A4A. I needed to know whether this kind of event might somehow prejudice applications. Their view was, on the contrary, it would support their policy of spreading the word as much as possible. We did lots of general publicity in the six weeks before the event, especially press releases and radio (theme: ‘money for old rope... and other things, too!’). I did write to all our town and parish councils, and Arun District councillors helped to spread the word. But we didn’t pay a penny for PR materials. I knew I could accommodate 80 at the venue; my plan was to review the take-up after three weeks and if necessary mail out all 1,300 groups on our organisations database. Within three weeks, though, we’d booked all 80 places. We held the meeting at a local leisure centre on a weekday evening in October: 7pm until 10pm, with cabaret-style seating so that people could make notes, and with the bar open. Seventy-four people turned up from 45 groups, ranging from parish councils to arts societies, tennis clubs, swimming clubs, air training corps, bowling clubs and historical societies. We asked everyone to make sure they brought an application form with them.

Philip Stevens from A4A south-east did a brief overview and then sat in as an observer for the evening. I had devised a multi-media presentation which was very, very practical: it went through the A4A application form question by question, and in a fairly light-hearted way interpreted the questions and pointed out what A4A was looking for in the answers.

It started with an ice-breaker – the Richard McMann One Minute Award for All Application. People introduced themselves and then had to tell their neighbour what they were bidding for, why, what it was going to achieve, how much it would cost, etc. There was a timer on the screen, ticking away, and a hooter after 60 seconds. The listener then had to say whether they had understood what the applicant was going to do with the money. Crucially, I kept presentation light. It wasn’t a lecture and there were lots of questions and answers going on throughout the session.

Take this example of the problems raised. Three bowling clubs had got together to try and manage a council bowling green, and wanted some funding. But they thought they weren’t eligible because the three groups didn’t have a single constitution or joint bank account. The answer, of course, was for one of the clubs to take the lead partner role and make the application on behalf of the others. And then I was able to add that if one applied as lead partner, the other two would still each be eligible to apply for up to £5,000 in their own right as well. Some unexpected issues came up on the form-filling. For instance, there is a data-monitoring question that asks the applicant to tick a box to show which ethnic groups will benefit. Most of our groups found it embarrassing to tick the box for ‘white’, because they felt they were being asked ‘Are you being prejudiced?’ or ‘Are you giving access to all?’ We were able to convince them that that wasn’t the purpose of the question and, given the particular locality, ‘white’ was going to be the most likely box to tick – and that wouldn’t be held against them.

The instant feedback was brilliant. But how did we do in reality? A4A did some analysis and told us that they’d had 85 requests for application packs from the Arun district in the six months preceding our press release about the meeting. In the four weeks after the press release

they’d also had 85 requests for packs! So we had clearly raised awareness of A4A just with the press activity. In January, A4A made five awards to groups in Arun, of which four had attended the meeting. I know of another 10 groups that have either applied or are planning to apply. Two of them were unsuccessful – but at least they’ve been in touch to ask me to go through the form, so I can check whether they did anything wrong. It’s difficult to measure whether we did well because there are no benchmarks for success. But the response was such that I’ll certainly do it again. 

Richard_McMann@arun.gov.uk

Philip Stevens, operations manager of A4A South-east, adds:

Richard approached us with the idea initially While Arun is not a priority area, we had identified that it hadn’t received much funding from A4A. Richard had picked this up from his own contacts and knowledge of Lottery funding in his area. 

The key thing was that he did a lot of public ity before the event, using groups who’d had success with A4A as case studies in the adverts. He managed to generate a lot of interest – particularly among groups that are not part of the ‘usual networks’. 

The event itself was very much about taking people through the process rather than the normal thing of running through policies and criteria. It was a common sense approach; do’s and don’ts of the application form. Richard had spent a lot of time preparing a really good interactive presentation. And having the bar open was a bonus.

There are always presentations and workshops going on, but you find the ‘usual suspects’ go to them – those who are linked in already to networks, on mailing lists, etc. In this case, because of the general advertising, a wider cross section of the population got to hear about it.