It’s just not good enough

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Alex Klaushofer looks into a common complaint that rejected applicants don’t get proper feedback

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The question of feedback – or lack of it –about rejected applications is one of those issues that is guaranteed to emerge at any gathering of those involved in the Lottery funding scene. Heather Brandon, chief executive of Volunteer Reading Help, a national charity that trains volunteers to help children with reading difficulties, is discouraged by her organisation’s experience of applying for Lottery funding. The charity has had two applications to the Community Fund turned down in the last six months. 

Initially, Brandon says, VRH had to convince the distributor that the service they were offering did not cover the same ground as the extra support offered by statutory education provision: ‘There were questions around additionality, but we seemed to get over that hurdle.’ But their application for £483,134 to develop work in the north-east, where the charity currently has no provision, was rejected on the grounds of ‘insufficient funds’ –after the charity had invested time in developing a business plan and the Community Fund had paid for external assessment of the proposed project. ‘A lot of time, effort and money had gone into it – why just throw it out?’ says Brandon. She phoned the grants officer who had dealt with the case to try and shed more light on the reason. ‘I got no further information,’ she says.

VRH is appealing against the rejection of a second application to fund support for children in care, in partnership with the literacy charity the Who Cares? Trust, in the north-west. Having secured Home Office funding for a salaried post, and TimeBank money to produce publications, the charity was seeking £197,614 to cover volunteer training. While the Community Fund argued that the project cut across existing provision, the Department of Health disagrees, and is supporting VRH’s appeal.

Brandon feels the lack of follow-up once an application is rejected is dispiriting. ‘You’re absolutely thrown out of the process,’ she says. With only 10 full-time staff, the organisation will think carefully about applying for lottery grants in future. ‘I’m not sure I could justify pulling people off to do the amount of work that’s required, having had two “nos”,’ she says.

Helen Bush, policy officer leading on Lottery funding at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, says: ‘It can be a real knock-back when groups are rejected. Especially for small groups, it takes time to gain the confidence to apply.’ The reasons for rejection can be mysterious even to the experts. Peter Riley, Lottery officer at Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council, regularly advises Lottery applicants. When one big application, supported by the local authority and backed by a feasibility study paid for by the distributor and the applicant organisation, was turned down, he was surprised. ‘I really couldn’t understand it,’ he says.

Unsurprisingly, the distributors have a different view of why applications fail. Peter Grant, Director of Operations UK at NOF, says, ‘The same things come up time and time again. The most common reason for rejections is that the project planning didn’t match the need identified. Lottery funders are necessarily looking for detailed project plans, they’re looking for logical project plans.’ For intermediaries such as Lottery officers, the question of failed applications links back to another issue of contention: the CF’s policy of confidentiality with regard to applicants. Mike Gaffney, Lottery officer at Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council, is regularly asked to comment on proposed bids by Sport England, the Arts Council and the Heritage Lottery Fund. ‘I feel the Community Fund need to follow the other distributors in consulting third parties about Lottery applications,’ he says. Releasing such information, some argue, could allow third parties to confer an unfair advantage on certain applicants by bolstering their bids – or conversely could discourage them from pursuing the application, for dubious reasons. Gaffney disagrees: ‘If they were to refer bids to us, we may be able to offer some support.’ And a change in policy would also help local authorities: ‘We’re supposed to be thinking strategically. How can we do that when we find Lottery bids that we don’t know anything about?’ The CF is conducting an internal review of the feedback it gives to rejected applicants. Adrienne Kelbie, the CF’s deputy chief executive, acknowledges that recipients of rejection letters find ‘insufficient funds’ an unsatisfactory explanation. ‘There is a difficulty in giving constructive feedback when there simply isn’t enough money,’ she says. ‘It may be easier for people to hear that there was something wrong with the project and that they can go away and fix it.’ Kelbie believes that one remedy for the frustration of rejection is to pre-empt inappropriate bids by strengthening preapplication support – something that the CF will be examining when it embarks on a review of its pre-application support and assessment process. She concedes that third parties who complain about the CF’s confidentiality policy may have a ‘valid point’. ‘It is a loophole in the system that’s unhelpful for partners. But you have to balance that against the fact that some groups may not want people to know about their bids,’ she says.

The HLF has already decided to bolster its pre-application support. As part of its five-year strategic plan, it is offering project planning grants of £5,000-£50,000, while new development teams in its regional offices will contact and support prospective applicants in local areas.

While distributors strive to improve their support to prospective and rejected applicants, projected falls in ticket sales mean there is an increasing likelihood of disappointment. Mike Wilkins, director of Awards for All England, warns: ‘The big issue is that money is getting tighter.’ Managing expectations is going to become a big item for all distributors, he suggests. ‘It’s part of our job to tell people accurately why they didn’t get the money, and to make sure we don’t stoke up demand for a project we can’t deliver.’