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A grant application that does not punish small organisations
A funder whose application process was quietly selecting for applicants with professional bid writers, redesigned around the organisations it was meant to reach.
- Client
- Brightmoor Trust
- Industry
- Grant-making foundation
- Location
- Manchester, United Kingdom
- Year
- 2024
Services
Our role. Service design, research with applicants and assessors, and end-to-end product design.
01The problem
Brightmoor Trust distributes around £14 million a year to community organisations across the north of England. Its trustees had noticed something uncomfortable in the data: the organisations receiving funding were consistently larger and better resourced than the organisations the Trust existed to support.
The application form was a fourteen-page document, downloaded as a file, completed offline and returned by email. It asked for a theory of change, a three-year financial projection and a safeguarding policy before it asked what the applicant wanted to do.
Small organisations were not failing the assessment. They were not reaching it. Roughly a third of downloaded forms were never returned.
02What we did
- 01
Follow the applications that never arrived
We contacted forty organisations that had downloaded the form and not submitted it. That group, rather than successful applicants, told us what the service was actually doing.
- 02
Separate eligibility from assessment
Most of the form existed to support assessment, but it was being presented as a barrier to entry. We split the process so that a short expression of interest establishes eligibility, and the demanding questions arrive only once an application is genuinely in contention.
- 03
Design with assessors in the room
The Trust’s assessors were understandably protective of the information they needed. We redesigned their review interface at the same time as the applicant journey, so nothing was removed from the form without a demonstrated alternative.
- 04
Test with the intended applicants
Six rounds of testing with volunteer-run organisations, several of whom completed the new form on a phone, which the previous process had made impossible.
03What we built
A two-stage application: a fifteen-minute expression of interest that anyone running an organisation can complete without help, followed by a fuller application for shortlisted applicants, part-completed from what they have already told the Trust.
Applications that save as they go and can be resumed, shared with a colleague, or completed across several sittings — the pattern that matched how volunteer-run organisations actually work.
An assessor workspace that surfaces the same information in a consistent structure, replacing a folder of returned documents in inconsistent formats.
04Outcome
- The Trust now hears from organisations it previously never heard from at all — the abandonment problem was, as suspected, a design problem.
- Assessors read applications in a consistent structure, which has made moderation between assessors substantially less contentious.
- The Trust publishes its eligibility criteria as part of the journey rather than in a separate policy document, and answers far fewer clarification emails as a result.
“We had convinced ourselves the form was rigorous. What Avenor showed us was that it was rigorous about the wrong thing, at the wrong moment, for the people we most wanted to fund.”
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Tell us what is not working. We will tell you what we think.
A first conversation is an hour, costs nothing, and usually ends with a straight answer about whether we are the right studio for the problem.