TRANSCRIPT
How much should you ask a specific funder for?
What tends to happen, for me at least, is that when a grant programme for £100,000 is announced, my brain will go, ooh, think of the things I could do with £100,000. That is a fun game. But when I do that, I actually reduce the likelihood of the grant being successful.
I reduce my chances in three ways:
1. Having an under-developed idea
2. Being an outlier
3. Being outside of my Goldilocks zone
An under-developed idea
Coming up with something new is less likely to be built on solid foundations in terms of what people need. It is less likely to link to consultation with the people you work with, be based on evidence that it is needed. You are less likely to have solid partnerships in place to help deliver it or existing letters of support, quotes and other materials for the application. You won't have a timeline or detailed budget worked out.
I spent years coming up with ideas to meet funding opportunities, making new project plans from scratch and in a rush. They very rarely worked and I used up a lot of time and energy. Funders can tell if your project planning is solid or if it has been pulled out of thin air.
How do I stop myself doing this? I identify what I call Satellite projects, the big dream ideas that come from in-depth knowledge of the people the organisation serves. I make time to develop these Satellite project ideas gradually. I get a timeline and a rough budget together and talk to potential partners about it, so that if an opportunity comes up we have a strong project to put forward.
Being an outlier in the bell curve.
£100,000 is the maximum. The grants are going to be given out in a bell curve. There's going to be a few of them up at the top, at £100,000. If the funder gives out lots of those, they're going to get through their money pretty quickly.
There'll be a few at the minimum end, but most of them are going to be somewhere in the middle. So if you don't have the time to read further, don't go for the maximum. Pull your ask into the middle somewhere.
Being too far outside my Goldilocks zone. Every organisation has a Goldilocks zone for funding bids - an amount that's not so high and not too low. I figure this out by looking at a few specific things.
The Goldilocks Zone is lower than my turnover (the amount of income showing on my accounts for the previous year). The funder wants to know that you're going to do something in your comfort zone that you can deliver. So if I run weekly classes that cost £25,000 a year and I ask for £100,000, that's four times the amount that I'm used to delivering and four times my existing workload. For a funder, that is going to look like a risk. Even the half-way point, £50,000, is more than I'm currently delivering by a long way. I want to ask for less than my turnover, less than £25,000.
The Goldilocks Zone is usually half the value of the project. Most funders don't want to fund every part of the budget. Most of them want to fund about half. They want half the money to come from them and half coming from somewhere else. On that basis, if my project costs £25,000, I could ask for £12,500. However, I can ask for half of my project value, which is different from the cost. There's a separate module on this in Budgeting, about in kind funding and how you calculate it, but the basics are: anything that I've already spent money on and I'm bringing to the project I can count towards its value. If I've already paid for equipment, get a venue for free or have people volunteering on the project that can add value of £5000. My total project value is £30,000.
I know that I need to be beneath the maximum grant, beneath my turnover and around half of my project value if £30,000 pounds. This suggests a Goldilocks zone of £15,000.
I'm not doing myself out of money that I could get, but I'm not going so high that it looks like I'm biting off more than I can chew.
This is a rough figure. I work out the exact number by using my timeline to construct an accurate budget.
There is a diagram below with the parameters listed to help you calculate the Goldilocks zone for your ask. I use this process each time I am deciding How Much To Ask For.
