Making magic

back to the contents page

Robin Smith and Peter Grant explain how the New Opportunities Fund’s new IT system will make everyone’s lives easier

Make sure you receive your fair share of lottery cash - take out a no-obligation trial subscription today.

During the last two years the New Opportunities Fund has launched more than 30 different programmes and is receiving all the applications that go with them. But with such a diverse range of activities, how can people at the fund work consistently and report all the information in the same way? While the obvious answer must be ‘with some difficulty’, there’s no doubt that planning for the future has been central to finding a solution. In 1999 we started to put together a process framework which could be applied to every type of grant and every programme. It had to be a process that would cover any mixture of capital and revenue, any scale and any type of project. It needed to cover whatever method we adopted to give out the money: open application, allocation, solicited application and so on.

We gathered information from our pro-gramme teams, from other distributors, grant applicants and award recipients. We also referenced the QUEST reports. From all of this we have produced a generic process to run our grant programmes.

This process allows those developing the programme to select from a ‘menu’ of options that generates all the materials required: application forms, assessment criteria, guidance notes, monitoring regimes and so on. It is structured around a ‘risk matrix’ that relates the application to the two main risks a funder faces: will the application deliver the benefits we want to see, and does the applicant have the ability to carry it out?

Once that was written, we looked for an IT system to back it up. But we always came back to the same issue. No existing system was capable of the flexibility we needed. There was nothing for it but to set about building our own software. After months of design and rigorous testing, the fund is now using it for all the programmes we have launched since the end of 2001. The system is called Magic (Monitoring and Assessing Grants Information Coordination), and all new applications and grants are logged on it.

If you work in a local authority, say, and want to apply for a lottery grant, you can now go on-line and fill out an electronic form. Magic validates what you put in (makes sure all your budgets add up, for instance!) and sucks it straight into the central system. Quicker submission means quicker turnaround time. Payments are authorised electronically – reducing the time from sending in your payment request to when it goes into your bank account. Future developments will include ‘customer accounts’ that will mean an organisation’s ‘fitness for purpose’ will not need to be assessed every time it applies for funding.

We also decided that we should go ‘back to basics’ and question exactly what information we needed on the system. Some other grant management systems seem to try to collect absolutely everything; they can get clogged up with lots of data that’s only ever used once. Magic dispenses with this inessential data.

Yes, there are teething problems, as there will be with anything new. But gradually we’re fixing these, and enhancing the system will only make the process of applying for grants smoother.

One problem that lottery funders and many others have been grappling with for years is standardisation of application forms and systems. Magic may not quite live up to its name in that area yet, but we do think it goes a long way towards finding that elusive solution.

Robin Smith is the Programme Support Coordinator and Peter Grant is Director of Operations at the New Opportunities Fund