Arts funding — changes to our application process

In our last blog, Beyond Access and Participation, we outlined the refreshed vision for Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s arts funding and began to explore what this might mean for the kinds of organisations we would support and the kinds of grants that we would make. Today, we’re publishing a draft of the new guidance and application form in advance of reopening the fund in the week commencing 1st April. We are also testing the form and guidance with a group of organisations — some who we currently fund and some we don’t — and we may make further improvements as a result.

Changing the guidance and the application form are just a small part of the changes we are making to the way we work. As you’ll see in the draft guidance, from April, we will be moving to two funding rounds per year, with a new application process at both first and second stage. The dates for the first round in the year will look like this:

• The first stage application form will be open from the week commencing 1st April – 31 May. This will consist of a set of questions, some top-level financial information and some demographic data for your organisation and board. We will also ask for your business plan and budget if you have them.
• We plan for all applicants to receive a decision on their first stage form by 31 July. This may vary depending on the volume of applications that we receive.
• If we progress your application to the second stage, we will contact you to request any additional documents and arrange an interview at a convenient time between August and October. We won’t ask you to write anything new at this stage, only to provide documents you already have and use.
• We will let you know the outcome by the end of October.

The second round of applications will follow a similar rhythm. Exact details will be published a little later this year.

To explain why we’re making these changes, it’s important to reflect on our past approach, the intentions behind it and how it’s been working in practice in the last year or so.

Our approach to applications thus far has been to give applicants as much flexibility as possible:

• We were always open to receiving applications.
• The 1st stage application form provided three open pages for applicants to respond to our focus areas – change in and across the system, shifting power, diverse & inclusive sector and evidence and learning.
• The 2nd stage application was a much deeper dive into project delivery plans, budgets, policies and additional questions we asked bespoke to each application.
• We made grants five times a year, usually in May, July, October, November and March.

This process ensured that we got a brilliant range of applications and that applicants had the space to respond to our criteria as they wanted to. Applications came in steadily throughout the year, which suggests that people applied when it best suited them.

While there were many positives, this process also meant that the team were almost always juggling first stage applications, second stage applications and final recommendations for our panel meetings. It meant that some applicants got a really quick turnaround and others didn’t and we couldn’t give applicants clarity from the outset about when we would be able to give them a final decision.

The breadth of applications and the openness of the application form meant that we sometimes didn’t have the information we needed to make a decision and needed to ask applicants to fill gaps in their proposal. The flexibility was intended to create a fairer process, but as the number of applications we receive goes up (in the last year we received 322), this system becomes harder to manage and takes up more time for applicants and the team here.

We hope that the move to a more structured approach will help in the following ways:

Firstly, we will be able to give applicants more clarity about the timelines for their application. Our current operating model, receiving applications all year round and making grants at five points in the year, means that new applications accumulate when we are in busy periods, often preparing for the next panel meeting. In turn, this means that we can’t always assess applications within the timeframes we expect to. With two cycles in the year, we can tell all applicants from the outset when they should expect a decision from us.

Secondly, we think these changes will help us make better decisions. For each application we read, we try to understand an organisation’s creative practice and their vision for social change, look at how they work and then do our due diligence on their safeguarding policies, their finances and their governance. Sometimes it’s a straightforward yes or no, but often it isn’t. In these instances, we’d like to have time with each application — to read it, consider it alongside others and revisit it after some time to process. The funding rounds will give us the time to work in this way and the more structured 1st stage application form will give us more consistency across the applications we receive.

Using an interview format for the second stage of the application process will enable a different kind of conversation to take place and help us build a different kind of knowledge of applicants compared to relying on the written word.

Finally, as a team we want to be better partners to the organisations we fund, and this means making more time to get out and visit people, build our own knowledge base, and facilitate connections between others in our networks. When dealing with the volume of applications we receive, this side of our work inevitably suffers if we don’t dedicate time to it.

Another benefit is that we’ll have windows in the year where we can make improvements to the application process based on the feedback we receive from applicants, so this is not the end of the changes that we will make. We will be hosting two webinars in April and May — full details are at the head of this blog — to answer any more questions and we’re excited to read applications in the coming months.