Why public sector funding needs better tools.
Between November 2024 and March 2025 a team at FF Studio worked with Steve Garrett at Sport England to explore better tools and patterns for public sector grants that would help both grantseekers and grantmakers.
In 2022-23, the UK government made grants of £46.8 billion. 66,000 awards were made under 1,500 schemes. Using grants as a tool to drive particular policy outcomes at a national level means that central government has taken over more grantmaking in recent years.
But both people seeking grants from the government and the public sector grantmakers themselves are underserved by existing grantmaking software platforms. We’ve seen this in our work with several grantmakers in the UK.
We see clear opportunities to create better outcomes for both funders and grantseekers, which could be realised with political will, co-ordination and co-operation.
We prototyped an approach for applying for and evaluating a grant to help demonstrate this untapped potential. We wanted to show what could be achieved if you can get leaders committing with ambition, practitioners working in concert, and commercial teams fully on board. And we wanted to provoke some ambitious thinking.
If you’re interested in the thinking, are interested in sponsoring it to get developed further, or want a similar approach applied to your own problem space, email us: hello@ff.studio
Context
Public sector grantmaking needs to deliver ease of use and efficiency, but also satisfy the transparency, accountability and compliance requirements that come with spending public money.
A grantmaker wants the certainty of detailed plans and accurate foresight that can quantify the benefit and return on investment and reduce risk, where the grantseeker dreams of the new hockey pitch surface. The application should be simple enough that it’s accessible, while also collecting the information a grantmaker needs to make good quality decisions.
But application forms that demand too much precision risk entrenching bias toward projects that are easier to quantify and toward larger grantseekers with more experience and capability in applying. It should provide the grantseeker with enough guidance that they can “self serve”, while still giving their project enough space to express itself. The grantmaker’s decision making process must be reasonable, defensible and transparent. The grantseeker wants a decision that doesn’t leave them waiting. The grantmaking process must provide mechanisms for complaint and redress. The reporting and measurement process must be effective.
Delivering all of these needs can be complex. It’s a systematised process of building trust between someone handing out money, and someone receiving it. A mix of trust building, governance, checks and balances and measurement.
But it is achievable.
Working in a broken market
But we know the need is there. In October 2024 a panel of tech experts asked what it meant to be the digital centre of government. The early responses indicated a need for tools for backend public sector tasks that include grant-giving and payments out. There are vendors, but the problem of public sector grantmaking is not yet solved. We’ve seen evidence of that in some patterns common to grantmaking organisations.
We see organisations directly digitising their historic paper-based approaches. Forms may be Word documents, resulting in an unpredictable user experience for grantseekers, and poor version control for grantmakers, who don’t know if they can trust the data they’re looking at. Data may need to be manually copied from one system to another, resulting in the risk of input error but also unclear data boundaries for data protection and other compliance. Manual processes result in inefficiency and, worse, mistakes.
Other grantmakers are using off the shelf digital platforms. However most vendors do not design their platform specifically for public sector needs. At best, they might offer a generalised grant-giving functionality, at worst they’re forcing products that reflect an existing worldview - sales funnels in the case of Salesforce-based platforms - to handle public sector grantmaking use cases. This results in users changing their needs to meet the system, rather than the other way round.
We’ve also seen individual grantmaking organisations building their own systems. These systems can be hard to manage and costly to update, and organisations often lack the resources to maintain and improve them. Working in isolation means the organisation cannot coordinate with others to purchase at scale.
And while grant applications can be reduced down to filling out a form and waiting for a response, we know from our work on the open funding pilot that treating grants purely transactionally underserves grantseekers as well as grantmakers.
The tools could and should be better.
So we asked: what could grantmaking look like if it were rooted in modern software practices and standards, was more respectful of everyone’s time, and allowed trust to be created together?
In some ways this project is a material exploration of “What if the no-brainers outlined in ‘Modern Grantmaking’ were manifested in software?”
What we made
A small multidisciplinary team of a designer and technologist designed flows and screens in Figma and created prototypes in code.
In the spirit of showing the thing, here’s the prototype: grants.ff.studio.
Many of the ideas we have prototyped are about humanising a process. Many of the ideas could be trigger points for conversations, honesty and building trust between grant seekers and grant makers.
Realtime grant processes save time and increase touch points
Grantmaking organisations often work on a 3 or 6 month rhythm, partly driven by reporting requirements from central government or the National Lottery.
When feedback loops are this long, they incentivise organisations and stakeholders to make application forms more complex, to give fewer but larger grants, and to increase compliance and evaluation processes. This happens because the risks - cost of mistakes, the need to course correct - are higher, and in turn this slows feedback loops further.
“Waiting for decisions also tends to be worse for smaller and less experienced organisations, because they tend to make fewer funding applications and will therefore be more dependent on each one. The key thing that funders can do to alleviate this misery is to keep up regular communication so that grantseekers know where they are in the funding process.” - Bull, Gemma; Steinberg, Tom. Modern Grantmaking: A Guide for Funders Who Believe Better is Possible (p. 59)
The grantseeker experience is often one of investing a lot of time into doing an application, which then disappears into a black hole, leaving uncertainty as to whether it was worth it.
If it’s cheaper to provide terrible experiences, and there’s no market pressure to improve those experiences, this pattern persists.
“utterly miserable applicant experiences are the norm, not the exception. [...] It is quite common for some funders to provide a very good service to their boards but not such a great service to their grantseekers and grantees. In these cases, it is usually because grantmakers regard their boards – rather than their grantseekers and grantees – as the main people they serve. - Bull, Gemma; Steinberg, Tom. Modern Grantmaking: A Guide for Funders Who Believe Better is Possible (p. 173-5)
We think grantmakers could massively increase the frequency of these rhythms so that instead of spending hours or days compiling a complete application, submitting it and then getting a binary yes or no response… feedback might be much faster.
We prototyped whether an application form could give immediate guidance to help a grantseeker while they’re applying for funding.
The prototype shows two interfaces in parallel: the applicant, or grantseeker's, view, and the grantmaker's view. The grantseeker can see guidance in situ, the grantmaker can see application details live too.
The live map uses real ONS data to show end users in real-time whether their area is a high priority one - in this instance, the higher the deprivation score of an area makes it a higher priority location
For example, we could tell users that we are already funding organisations doing similar work in their area, which might inform how and what grants they apply for. It might even help them make an informed decision about whether to apply - potentially saving them time. Grantmakers should play a more active role in providing data and forging links between communities and grantseekers. It’s public money, so grantmakers should welcome the opportunity to make data more transparent.
Our prototype shows contextual information that helps existing, current and potential grantseekers. They can tell if areas are a funding priority for the grantmaker, and the level of funding activity the grantmaker already has in that area.
The prototype doesn’t just propose publishing its own data, it also uses existing public data. While a lot of the data in the prototype is fake, the deprivation data is real. Because ONS publishes the data, the team’s technologist created a micro-API to be able to access it for this project, and others could use it too! It’s available at https://github.com/james/IMD_API. Publishing data publicly helps other organisations develop capability.
However, this doesn’t mean that we should display the raw public data when publishing it. We present content and detail appropriately for the different needs of grantseekers and grantmakers. A dot on a map and “we are keen to fund in this area” for grantseekers becomes “IMD decile 6” and “Birmingham 082D” for grantmakers (expert language for expert users).
We can translate a dot on the map for end users into expert language for expert users on the admin interface
To make this real: use APIs to access public data. Transparency requires political/leadership cover - an open-by-default culture requires courage. But it shouldn't - this is basic stuff. The “economic benefits” outweigh the narrow "financial cost” of doing it. Pick a department to own it and get on with it.
To make this more radical: broaden the grantmaker-grantseeker relationship so it’s many to many: organisations should be able to see who is doing similar work in their area, which will create opportunities to share lessons and work together. They should also see organisations that are unsuccessful in grant application, and be able to offer them support. Broader collaboration can create constructive connections between communities that are funded from similar sources.
Play well with tools grantseekers are already using
We know that grantseekers aren’t writing applications alone. As grant applications get worked on by multiple people at different times, we started out thinking about multiplayer applications. But we quickly decided that rather than forcing small organisations looking for money to adopt new tooling, it would be better to encourage larger funders to find ways to accept the tools already in use - generally, Word or Google Docs.
Connecting a Google Drive or Sharepoint account allows grantseekers to continue using their own stack to collaborate internally on applications
Building up trust - "does this organisation exist? Can we give them money?" can also use existing tooling or infrastructure, like social accounts, governance documents or bank accounts.
Allow grantseekers to embed their documents and reduce the amount of Ctrl+C Ctrl+V into a web form. Grantmakers could then extract semantic data from those documents into structured data formats to be assessed, queried and analysed.
This flexibility with formats can go beyond accepting text submissions in common document formats. During the Open Funding Pilot, we trialled video submissions for grant applications. The volume of video submissions was low, but we noticed that all of the organisations who used video submissions were disability charities. We believe that being more flexible with formats opens up access and removes barriers to applying for funding.
There’s a balance to strike between flexibility and ease for the grantseeker, and structured, queryable data for the grantmaker. Minimising barriers to funding and reducing duplication of work, while still opening up access. That tension deserves exploring further.
To make this real: Asking for access to grantseekers’ collaborative documents is a valuable way to build confidence and trust together, and could be an early part of the process. The technology exists and is common, just use it.
To make this more radical: Consider how technology could help a grantmaker change the traditional relationship between grantmaker and grantseeker. Grantmakers could accept formats that go beyond text, like video and audio. They could allow grantseekers who struggle with written applications to pair with a grantmaker on writing it together. Approaches like this would need to be handled carefully to avoid introducing bias or unfairness, but the promise of accessing communities and grantseekers that might have been historically underserved is worth exploring.
Feedback should validate to save time, and guide to create new potential
We added 2 kinds of data-driven feedback into the form, validation and guidance.
Validation sets boundaries: if an application exceeds them, it cannot continue. We can save time and effort for both grantseekers and grantmakers by saying “No” as early as possible.
Data-based validation in situ
Data-based guidance in situ
The other kind of feedback is guidance, which provides some data-driven contextual information that might be useful. The grantseeker decides how to act upon it. It doesn’t prevent an application from continuing because the grantmakers cannot know the local grantseeking context, and by definition grantmakers know the least about communities and activities that they’ve historically funded least.
Guidance shouldn’t undermine the agency of either grantseeker or grantmaker. There are still going to be humans who will consider the application as a whole and make the funding decisions.
To make this real: At the strategic level, grantmakers need to be clear about what they want to fund and why. Modern Grantmaking talks about how “without a clear mission your funding organisation is likely to spray grants wildly all over the place”. And at the application level: how do grantmakers provide negative feedback without discouraging good applications? How do they provide positive feedback without giving false hope? Doing this well means having great content design.
To make this more radical: Remove the notion of validation at all - get grantmakers to publish their investment thesis like venture capitalists do, and make it a human process. Good example: Bethnal Green Ventures.
Multi-dimensional feedback gives grantseekers the bigger picture
Grantmakers will often have multiple priorities for a fund. It is easy to say “we are particularly interested in reaching people living on lower incomes, children aged 5-16, LGTBQ+ people and older people”, but things get more complicated as these priorities interact. Does a project have to reach more than one of these groups? Can it ignore three of the groups if it’s very effective at reaching the fourth group?
We started thinking about this as “multi-dimensional” feedback. We explored different ways to think about and represent this to the user. We’re already providing feedback on each form section, but at the end of the form, we can programmatically scan across all sections, compare that with existing grant data, and display the multi-dimensional information that stands out.
A designer's prototype of early eligibility feedback for an applicant, directing the applicant to where they might improve the application
…and a developer's prototype with more granular feedback
To make this real: For this to work, grantmakers need to already have the realtime, data driven guidance as described above. We think that displaying both positive and negative messages together conveys the appropriate nuance, but this requires further user testing and experimentation.
More broadly, they also need to have clear, programmatically 'styled' rules or goals for a fund: “increase activity for more than 100 people by more than 5%” is both a clearer criterion than “increase activity”, and understandable by a computer. Programmatic rules let the application form provide programmatic hints and advice (perhaps they also allow programmatic writing of applications… a newish fraud vector to watch out for). Do grantmakers think like this currently? It feels like a capability gap.
To make this more radical: If some of the funding assessment criteria are programmatically styled, a grantmaker could trial algorithmically-assessed applications in parallel with human-assessed ones to test whether technology can help grantmakers avoid bias or augment the capability of their assessment teams.
Verification and trust should build over time
Many small grassroots organisations might experience a disproportionate burden to prove their trust-worthiness, compared to registered or constituted organisations. To better support successful applications by grassroots groups in receiving awarded funds, a grantmaker can build trust over time by asking for different types of verifying information through the application process.
Sometimes, a grantmaker will verify a small organisation is active by looking for Facebook pages that are active. This kind of informal verification can play a role, as long as it's part of a longer timeline of building trust that will include more robust methods.
Fraud is a real issue for grantmakers. Public funds should be spent with care, appropriate controls and robust evaluation. But common anti-fraud monitoring and other prevention strategies can introduce bias in favour of existing grantseeking institutions that can more easily meet anti-fraud requirements. In turn this risks reducing funding made available to under-funded target groups and communities.
Trust isn’t a binary that flips in a transactional moment, it emerges over time.
So tools and platforms must allow that timeline of trust to be shown and built. And if feedback cycles are much shorter, and marginal costs lower, there is an opportunity to build trust over time more effectively.
Progress reports along the way
At 80% trust, grantmakers might be confident enough to release funds (after all, is 100% ever feasible?)
Similarly, a grantseeker already has systems that can verify and prove trust, for example Open Banking. They might grant limited, controlled access to them to provide evidence to grantmakers.
To make this real: By building up trust in small steps, we are able to access groups that wouldn’t normally be able to access funding or that grantmakers cannot normally reach, while reducing the cost of any fraud. However, reduced cost of fraud does not mean zero fraud: guaranteeing zero fraud would require handing out no money - counterproductive and pointless.
To make this more radical: If a community is both hard to reach and asking for a modest amount, a grantmaker’s threshold for trust might be lower. They might feel more confident in creating a new relationship by making some funding available and starting the journey to trust. They might consider “default to Yes” approaches. Where the need is great, the money is small, just do it. And for grantseekers with a trusted record of delivery, what’s the grantmaking equivalent of a pre-approved credit card application?
Project credits
FF team
Debs Durojaiye
James Darling
With support from
Anna Goss
Eliot Fineberg
Rod McLaren
Client team
Steve Garrett