National Lottery bid writing can be challenging. For many charities lottery funding is one of the biggest grant opportunities available, so the impact of failure can be substantial. Our team of expert Lottery bid writers have been through countless Lottery bids over the last 20 years and secured £ Millions for clients. We don’t just write the application, we support clients to undertake consultation and design the project and budget in line with key principles such as ‘people in the lead’. We can do all the heavy lifting to make the process simple and straightforward and give you the greatest chance of success.
About National Lottery Funding
National Lottery funding for good causes is split across twelve different Lottery funding distributors. It is then given to charities and other not for profit organisations through grants. Across all the distributors nearly £1.8 Billion in grants were made in the last year. Grants typically range from £5k to £500k over one to five years depending on the grant scheme. Some distributors fund across the UK and others target only England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. The largest distributors include:
National Lottery Community Fund (previously known as BIG Lottery Fund) Funding programmes include: Reaching Communities, Awards for All, People and Places, Improving Lives, People and Communities. Some programmes are ongoing and some are timebound.
National Lottery Heritage Fund (previously known as Heritage Lottery Fund) Funding schemes include: Grants for Heritage, Shared History Fund, Digital Skills and others.
Arts Council Programmes include: Project grants, Culture Recovery Fund, Thriving Communities fund and more.
Planning and Developing Lottery Bids
Planning a successful lottery bid starts with a thorough understanding of the distributor you are approaching. Our lottery funding consultants are constantly reviewing the changing funding programme criteria, analysing the nature of grants that are being made and collecting intelligence from lottery assessors through every bid that we work on. This knowledge is a crucial starting point to developing a proposal that aligns with the distributors aims.
Clients typically have a clear idea of the activities or project they would like to achieve funding for but often haven’t taken a ‘people in the lead’ approach to developing the idea and the evidence of need for it in a participative way. We initially work with the client to understand their vision and to develop appropriate consultation approaches with multiple stakeholders. Where necessary we can also support evaluation of existing activity to support evidence of impact to date and continuing or evolving need.
Lottery bids usually require a clear set of achievable and realistic outcomes with specific targeted indicators and a logical link back to the activities and evidenced needs. These elements form the core of the project and we focus on developing these with the client and fully utilising the design input of stakeholder consultees.
Our consultants guide clients on budget development in line with factors such as cost per beneficiary to help ensure the bid can demonstrate value for money.
With the project fully planned and budgeted we can move on to creating a compelling written bid in line with the process of the particular Lottery scheme. We engage closely with clients throughout to ensure that our proposals closely align with your aims and values and make the strongest possible case for funding.
If you are interested in finding out more about how we can support you to develop a winning lottery bid then please get in touch.
