The Funding Factory
Fund raising is the Achilles Heel of many Community and Voluntary Sector (CVS) organisations. The lack of an effective, consistent fundraising strategy can lead to stop-start services and drains the commitment of staff members. J-go can help to take pain out of a fundraising campaign, with confident, targeted applications that sell your organisation to funders in the local, national and European agendas.
- Funding Applications & Bid Writing
- Commercial Tenders and Public Sector Service Level Agreements
- The Funding Factory Events
- Gateway to the Olympics
- Developing a Fundraising Strategy
- Private Sector Funding Opportunities
- Neighbourhood Fundraising Packages
- Planning Gain Consultancy
- Social and Financial Auditing
- Finance in the UK for Islamic Community Organisations
Funding Applications & Bid Writing
We are expert fundraisers and professional funding application writers. Using our experience we can quickly help you to define your application approach. Ensuring that the bid to be made makes the most of your organisation’s assets and community reach, without overreaching your capacity or ability to deliver the promised outputs and outcomes.
We work to deadline and that’s what funding applications are all about. Once commissioned, we work-plan carefully for you, irrespective of the urgency of the deadline, to ensure that all the mandatory preparation work is complete, the essential base-line research is undertaken and the application contains the best offer your organisation can produce.
In addition we can also help you to build your own capacity as fundraisers, as we undertake a commission for you. J-go works with our clients not for them. J-go’s whole ethos is around empowering the CVS to undertake a growing role in the delivery of a wide range of services, in a broad variety of agendas.
Grant regimes and application opportunities come in all kinds of different sizes, requirements, targets and themes. To make a winning application it is important to write to specification, using up-to-date information and demonstrating knowledge and understanding of local, national and European strategic criteria. We stay up to date and offer our clients cutting edge information bespoke to the application being made to help you make a winning bid.
J-go can offer its bid writing and complete funding application service at very competitive rates for small applications of up to 6-8 pages, for medium applications of up 20 pages and also major applications, such as ERDF/ESF and Stage 2 BLF or Opportunities Fund applications, by negotiation, to suit your circumstances.
Commercial Tenders and Public Sector Service Level Agreements:
Over the past few years more and more Local Authorities and Public Sector bodies are seeking to outsource service delivery to the CVS. The Government has signalled that this will dramatically increase and CVS organisations need to be up to speed and ready to take advantage of the increasing opportunities available.
Responding to commercial tenders or public offerings is a subtly different game to making funding applications to the normal grant regimes. A different approach and language is required to meet the criteria of a tender invitation and J-go has extensive experience of making commercial tender bids on behalf of organisations large and small.
It is also often the case that tender invitations will request a partnership approach from responders, which need to be substantiated and validated as working partnerships ready to deliver on the ground. J-go can help you quickly draft a working partnership or delivery consortium agreement from our own model documents library.
Tender invitations often demand a wide variety of backing and evidential documents to be presented as evidence of previous experience, financial capability and service delivery capacity. It can often be the case that the appendix pack of supporting documents ends up far bigger than the service description. The assembly of the supporting documents is a common default in tender responses and can be become very complicated when responding as a partnership. Insurance, accounts, financial statements, track-record, quality marks, policies, CV's of individuals, CRB checks, references, annual reports, partnership agreements and full details of tax and NI contributions are often demanded as supporting evidence.
J-go can help, through experience, to co-ordinate the entire collation of the supporting evidence as well as creating your original text for the service description. We understand large and small CVS organisations and know who to consult and bring on board to make sure your organisation or partnership is pulling together and creating the best offer you can to deadline.
The Funding Factory Events:
The Funding Factory is a new concept for producing funding applications and is dedicated to making your time more efficient and productive. We cannot promise to take away the pain of ploughing through a complex application, but we can show you how you can get the job done to a high quality standard, in two days flat.
The Funding Factory works by pooling collective effort; run as a two day event (Thursdays and Fridays), held at our premises, for up to 10 organisations at a time. It will allow you to finish a complete draft of a complex funding application for your organisation and walk away with hard & soft copies on Friday night, ready for Monday morning. This could cost at least £1,200 if you used a consultant.
On joining one of our Funding Factory events, you will be provided with a personal ICT workstation, with a blank copy of the application form and with pro-formatted suggestions and advice to tackle each question. In our Funding Factory events, you will be able to take advantage of our panel of experts - onsite, our bespoke resource library and our open workshop consultancy service to help you tackle all the questions creatively and enhance your unique application.
Each Funding Factory event is bespoke to a single grant application form and usually takes place two weeks before the funding application deadline. All participants in the two day Funding Factory are targeting the same grant funding opportunity. The Funding Factory allows you to take advantage of the support; discipline and creativity of working in a dedicated team, with expert advice on hand to discuss your application, practically assist and ensure you hit your deadline. Nobody leaves a Funding Factory event without a completed draft application, ever!
Gateway to the Olympics:
The 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games represent huge opportunities for small businesses, the CVS and the Social Enterprise movement. J-go is up-to-date and expert in the emerging Olympic agenda. We can offer your organisation or partnership, training seminars for fundraisers, key staff and committee members to explore potential Olympic funding opportunities. We can help to target your organisation to the appropriate opportunity, matching tender requirements that will be available from the leading Olympic bodies such as Olympic Delivery Authority, London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, London Development Agency and Greater London Authority.
Each seminar can accommodate 8 individuals and will focus on specific tender and funding opportunities available at the time and can be delivered at your premises or at our training centre.
Developing a Fundraising Strategy:
VS organisations need to think forward when considering fundraising, to underpin the organisations future sustainability. A common period to plan for is three years, often integrated into a business plan. It is also the ase that a major grant funding bid can take up to a year to come on stream and it is judicious to make multiple applications on different timescales to help plug the gaps and smooth the forward cash-flow.
Planning to make a number of funding applications over a short period of time also helps to make your working effort far more efficient, as the necessary preparatory work is reused for each application. Multiple funding applications can also be used to support each other as ‘match funding’ and funders also find confidence in knowing that other funding sources are considering investing in the proposed project and the delivery organisation.
J-go offers a three-day ‘Fundraising Strategy’ course for up to ten members of your staff and management committee members, covering all aspects of mounting a sustained fundraising effort. The course will help to ensure that your organisation presents itself as a credible applicant with realistic plans, referenced to local, regional and nation policies and up-to-date baseline information.
Prepare your organisation for successful fundraising by booking our three-day course to capacity build your organisational fundraising skills and motivate your staff team. We can bring the course to your premises or provide the course at our own training centre in East London. The course can be also undertaken as a long weekend away, with accommodation and transport provided at our training centre in beautiful countryside just 40 minutes from London.
Private Sector Funding Opportunities:
In recent years major companies and corporations in the UK have adopted more seriously the concept of ‘Corporate Responsibility’. In the East End of London, the Canary Wharf development and the adjacent City of London expansion have brought the head offices of major corporations and financial service companies into close proximity to areas with low household incomes and local communities suffering from social exclusion and poverty.
This has been recognised as an opportunity by many progressive private companies and various initiatives have already been developed. These range from allowing employees time off to take part as individuals in community days, clearing litter and beautifying small areas, to medium term arrangements, helping community organisations with business planning, marketing and promotion, to longer term support, supporting community organisations with funding and professional advice to develop and expand they activities.
In the USA corporations have made very substantial contributions to the CVS. Here in the UK this is a fast developing field and offers opportunities for creative community organisations to be ‘first movers’ and build short and long-term partnerships with private companies to gain advice, voluntary help and funding.
Routes into the sector are more complex than public and charitable funding opportunities and need to be carefully researched. We can help you find appropriate opportunities, linked to your organisations activities, identify the person you need to approach and prepare correspondence and a proposal to give you the best chance of establishing a fruitful relationship.
Neighbourhood Fundraising Packages:
J-go offers a specific package of fundraising services designed for regeneration bodies, councils and other strategic programmes, wanting to enable a group of CVS organisations within a specific area. The package can accommodate the needs of up to 25 small organisations, all located within a defined area, such as a NDC (New Deal for Communities) programme. The service aims to help small community organisations to apply for and gain funding from external sources to that of the home programme, creating ‘additionality’ to the funding made available by the home programme.
This has multiple benefits for the programme as a whole, the local community, the individual organisations and the individual staff and management committee members involved. The programme is run as a coherent series of seminars and workshops, bespoke to an agreed calendar of events and funding deadlines, relevant to the particular area.
The programme can be run over various periods of time from six weeks to one year. The programme is undertaken in three parts, which can be bespoke to the needs and abilities of the organisations involved. J-go will help each organisation to;
Prepare for making an application, by; Reviewing their paperwork, to ensure that they have all the requirements for a successful application, prove their baseline information and beneficiary targeting, summarise track records, undertake due diligence, risk assessment and business plan compatibility.
Make funding applications, by:
Targeting appropriate and available funding regimes, brainstorming ideas and project concepts, ensuring continuity within the group, assisting application drafts, creating project budgets, forming abiding partnerships where appropriate and ensuring that bidding deadlines are met.
Create successful applications, by:
Helping applicants to discovering hidden value and additionalities, ensuring that proposals are SMART, identifying in-kind funding contributions and creating exponential outcomes for the wider programme.
The programme automatically helps to capacity build the local organisations and individuals involved, but we can, if requested, build in a far more extensive capacity building module into the programme to ensure that the benefits gained are embedded into the local CVS in the area.
This programme is aimed at strategic bodies, wishing to enable their local CVS organisational partners. The product of the programme is external funding brought in to the area to supplement the existing funding available within the programme boundaries. This ‘gearing in’ of external resources can be used to create an additional impact for the programme as a whole, but also help to tackle the sustainability barrier, which is often apparent within large regeneration programmes.
Our service helps to break the ‘dependency culture’, which can develop, when large programmes are present and the local community and voluntary sector small organisations start to rely on the local funding availability. This is a common problem for large programmes and our approach offers a creative and beneficial alternative. For relatively little investment Regeneration bodies or a council can enable up to 25 organisations in one go and help to wean small organisations off the assumption that the existing programme will provide all funding availability within the area.
J-go can design a Neighbourhood Fundraising Programme to suit most situations. We can provide a generic programme, covering all aspects of needs or provide a specifically themed programme, concentrating on particular beneficiary groups, such as youths or older people, or activity related programmes, which target specific themes, such as; preparation for work, or diversion from anti-social behaviour.
Planning Gain Consultancy:
Planning Gain Obligations (previously known as Section 106 agreements) are a valuable source of potential funding for voluntary sector organisations and charities working within areas of London and the South East England where major new development is ongoing. The most common form of ‘planning gain’ demanded of private (and social) developers by Local Authority Planning Departments is for the provision of ‘affordable housing’, but this is set to change with the new “Planning for a Sustainable Future” White Paper currently being consulted by DCLG.
The white paper proposes that Planning Gain can be applied equally well to local investments in community organisations and charities providing services within the same area as the potential development. Common themes are; environmental improvements, investment in community infrastructure, arts and cultural activities and projects designed to achieve social cohesion.
J-go is expert in negotiating planning gain for community organisations. We can help you to identify the opportunities to work with developers in your area, discover special (possibly unique) circumstances that can be used to further a negotiation, and show you how to approach and convince a Local Authority Planning Department or a commercial developer of the validity of your demands.
Social and Financial Auditing:
All funders are concerned with justifying the grants they have made to organisations. It is a normal requirement for the project managers to produce a ‘final project report’ for the funder. A good report will not only account for and justify the way in which the funding was spent, but will also detail the ‘outputs’ and ‘outcomes’ of the project.
J-go can help you present your project results in the best light, ensuring that your project is correctly judged against the original aims and objectives of the funding application. J-go can also help you to identify any ‘additionality’ your project has achieved. These may well be ‘soft outcomes’ which are hard to immediately realise as products of your project, such as improved self-esteem and confidence amongst your beneficiaries, but they are valid outcomes that count towards the “balanced scorecard” approach now accepted as the most valid indictor of success. Developing a productive relationship with funders is a long-term effort, which can pay off with repeated funding. Cement that relationship with high-quality final reports and audits and impress your funders!
Finance in the UK for Islamic Community Organisations:
Islamic CVS organisations have, in many cases, been tremendously successful in building active, well attended and productive initiatives throughout the Thames Gateway area. However, Faith-led organisations are sometimes disadvantaged in applying for public funding. Many grant funders are prevented from resourcing organisations that promote a specific faith. Small organisations, such as local community-based Masjids, are managed and controlled in a traditional context, sometimes resulting in a misinterpretation of the requirements of governance, transparency, accounting practice and audit.
We offer one-day Islamic Public Finance courses, or we can come to your organisation and work alongside your staff in an organisational review, which can help institutions re-model their financial administration to meet the requirements of grant funders. We can help you produce ‘separated’ accounts, which individually detail Faith activity and Community activity, within the same organisation. We offer one to three day courses to help Islamic organisations develop finance systems which can help to access both public and private finance, without compromising Shari’ah governance and traditions.