More information about your Reaching Communities application
We need more information about your Reaching Communities application
Thank you for all your work telling us about your project so far. Now that you are through to Stage 2 of the application process, we need some more information so that we can make our final decision.
The information we need
Your funding officer will email you to:
- tell you what information we need
- tell you which sections of this guidance to read to prepare that information
- give the date we need this information by
- clarify or ask for more detail for information you’ve already given
- ask questions about your application
- check and confirm your contact details
- check and confirm the location of your project
How much to submit
Depending on what we ask about, you might need to prepare and submit up to 15 pages of additional information. This includes appendices. You must use a minimum font size of 11.
In addition to this information, we’ll also ask you to send:
- a completed copy of our current finances table (Excel spreadsheet, 345 KB)
- a completed copy of our budget table (Excel spreadsheet, 122 KB)
- a copy of your annual accounts
- if you have capital costs over £20,000, a completed land and buildings checklist (PDF, 681 KB)
If you need extra help
Your funding officer is happy to support you and help if you need it. Email or call them for advice.
If you have any communication needs
If you have any communication needs, like needing something in a different format or language, ask your funding officer. They can help arrange the support you need, including paying for a BSL (British Sign Language) interpreter.
Guidance for the information we need
In your email, your funding officer will ask for information relating to one or more of the following sections. Follow the link to the appropriate section.
- Activities and services
- Equity, diversity, and inclusion
- Community Involvement and Empowerment
- Aims and outcomes
- Your organisation
- Safeguarding
- Financial and project sustainability
- Making a positive difference to your environmental impact
- Partnerships
- Capital requirements
- Generous leadership
Once you have read the appropriate guidance, find out what happens next.
A. Activities and services
Your application needs to set out the main activities the grant will fund for the first year, and an outline for the rest of the project.
You’ll need to tell us about the specific activities, services and tasks you’ll deliver. This should include:
- what sort of activities will happen and how often they’ll take place
- the exact location (including postcodes) of these activities
- how these activities will support the community and/or your organisation
- how and why you chose this approach
- what risks have you identified to your project being successful and how you plan to manage them
If your project has several activities, you may wish to add a project or action plan as an appendix.
B. Equity, diversity, and inclusion
Equity, diversity, and inclusion are considered in all our decisions.
We would like to understand your organisation’s approach to equity, diversity, and inclusion and how you will apply it to this project and its delivery. This includes:
- considering the ways that the communities you work with experience disadvantage, discrimination and poverty
- plans for how to overcome barriers these communities might have to accessing your service
- the ways you empower people to feel valued and allow them to participate meaningfully in your activities and decision-making
- the ways you recognise and support those who are most affected by multiple forms of discrimination or disadvantage based on their race, gender, sexuality, disability, class or other factors
C. Community involvement and empowerment
We want you to:
- meaningfully involve your community in designing, developing and delivering your project – especially the people that will directly benefit from your work
- help your community have real control over things that are important to them, like influencing services they use or decisions that affect their lives
We are more likely to fund organisations that are managed and led by people with personal experience of the issues you help deal with. They could be volunteers, staff or trustees.
Tell us more about:
- how you involve your community in designing, developing and delivering activities
- to what extent your organisation is led, managed and staffed by people with lived experience of poverty, disadvantage or discrimination – or, by people with personal experience of the issues you tackle
- how your organisation works, or could work, to help your community have control over things that are important to them and that affect your community
- how you take a strengths-based approach – building on the resources of your community and making use of the knowledge, skills and experience they already have
- how you address challenges to empowering your community
- if relevant, how your organisation helps people know about and claim their rights
D. Aims and outcomes
We would like to understand what you are trying to achieve for your community and/or your organisation, and how you plan to learn from your work.
We refer to this using these words:
- ‘aims’ to describe what your organisation is trying to achieve
- ‘outcomes’ to refer to the difference or change that your project hopes to make
- ‘evidence’ for the measurements you make to see if you’ve achieved your outcomes
If you’re successful, your intended outcomes will become part of your grant agreement with us. You’ll need to update us on your progress on achieving these outcomes throughout the project. So, consider how realistic, measurable and achievable they are for your organisation.
We do not mind how you present this information to us, but we’re keen to understand:
- your organisation’s overall aim and how this project fits within that overall aim
- the main outcomes that your project will contribute to
- how your outcomes relate to one or more of the following groups:
- project beneficiaries (the people who’ll benefit from your work)
- volunteers or staff
- your organisation, including your organisation’s skills and capacity
- the wider community
- the number of unique project beneficiaries (the people you’re trying to help) for your work
- how you plan to monitor and measure the difference you’re making (this should be proportionate to the scale and complexity of your project) by recording evidence
- how you will share your learning and evidence so it can be used more widely
- how you’ll apply learning to improve your work
How to present your planned activities, outcomes and evidence
We don’t mind how you share information about activities you plan to do and outcomes you hope to achieve.
But you could make a table using these column titles:
- Activities: the things the project will do - the activities, services and tasks you plan to provide
- Outputs: the intended result or deliverable of the activity, often expressed as numbers of people or things
- Outcomes: the change or difference you hope to make
- Evidence: the information you plan to measure and use as evidence for how you’ve met an outcome
Example of what to write in the table:
- Activities: 3 programmes of personal development, 10 workshops in each programme covering a range of topics
- Outputs: 50 beneficiaries completed personal development work
- Outcomes: beneficiaries demonstrate improved social wellbeing and increased confidence in their teamwork skills
- Evidence: combination of self-report measures: a wellbeing scale, caregiver reporting, recording and assessing regular direct observations
For further guidance about what information, or evidence, to gather, read:
For further information about our missions and the impact we’re looking to make through our funding, read:
E. Your organisation
We want to understand more about your organisation – its strengths and the challenges you face.
Tell us more about:
- the communities you currently work with and the difference you’re making through your work – with current beneficiary numbers where possible
- how well you’re connected locally with other organisations – specifically, if you’ll be working with or referring to any other organisations when delivering your project, and how this will work
- your organisation’s leadership structure and governance processes. If your application is successful, you’ll need to sign our terms and conditions which require your organisation follow our guidance on financial controls and financial governance
- the policies, including a whistleblowing policy, your organisation has in place (you do not need to send copies of these policies to us)
- information about your trustees or directors:
- their skills and experience
- how they’re involved in your work
- how often they meet
- how often they’re trained
- information about your staff and volunteers:
- their skills and experience
- their main responsibilities
- which project roles are currently being carried out by existing staff, and which will be new roles – we expect to see open recruitment for new roles
- your arrangements to supervise staff and volunteers
- any people or organisations you may employ to support with organisational development, evaluation or impact management
The National Lottery Community Fund is a Living Wage Friendly Funder. This means that we encourage our applicants to pay their staff the UK real living Wage. Visit the Living Wage Foundation to find out more.
F. Safeguarding
We expect grant holders to promote a culture of safeguarding, to keep people safe and to respond to safeguarding incidents. If the project involves working with children and young people (under the age of 18) or adults at risk, we need to make sure you can meet our requirements.
Tell us:
- that you understand that if you sign a grant agreement with us, you are agreeing to meet our safeguarding expectations
- that your organisation has its own tailored policy for safeguarding and protecting children and adults at risk
- about your approach to reviewing your safeguarding policy, and training staff and trustees on its contents
- whether all sub-grant-holders and third parties (including contractors) appointed by you to work with children and adults at risk have their own safeguarding and protection policies and procedures in place
- that you have named people responsible for safeguarding such as a designated safeguarding lead
- that your staff understand how to deal with and escalate concerns
- that you can show how you track safeguarding concerns and tell us how many concerns you have managed in the past 12 months
- that you conduct Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks, if needed
- that you notify us of any serious safeguarding concerns or incidents withing 3 days, as explained in our safeguarding expectations
G. Financial and project sustainability
We want to know your plans for the financial sustainability of this project and what the long-term legacy might be. If you intend to continue the project beyond the lifetime of our grant, tell us how you might fund it in the future.
This could include:
- which funders you might apply to for more funding
- ways you might generate your own income
We understand that you might not have a fixed plan at this stage of the project. But welcome any ideas or plans you have.
H. Making a positive difference to your environmental impact
At The National Lottery Community Fund, we aim to:
- help the wider community and voluntary sector to improve its environmental impact
- lead the way in managing our own environmental impact
- demonstrate influence and leadership on environmental sustainability
Our strategy for 2023 to 2030 states we will consider environmental sustainability as part of every application. If you are successful, your grant agreement will include a summary of your commitment to environmental sustainability.
Tell us more about:
- your plans to make a positive difference to your environmental impact
- how you know this activity will be the most environmentally appropriate or impactful action you could take
- how you’ve checked whether any of your activities are harmful to the environment (such as use of petrol or diesel vehicles, or single use plastics)
- your plans for addressing any harmful activities
- what environmental policies or practices you have
- whether you have an environmental action plan with targets
Let us know if you need support developing an environmental action plan, environmental policies or conducting an energy audit. Our funding officers can help and highlight costs of becoming an environmentally sustainable organisation.
You can also read our guidance about reducing your environmental footprint.
I. Partnerships
If you are applying for funding as a partnership with other organisation(s), all partners must be on the list of organisations that are eligible to apply.
We usually give our funding to the lead organisation in a partnership. They can then pay the other partners for the work they do. If your partnership will not have a lead organisation, we'll pay out the funding separately to each organisation.
Tell us more about:
- the reasons for your organisations coming together and the value it will add to your project
- any previous experience you have of working together
- the roles and responsibilities of each partner organisation in managing and delivering the project
- the arrangements you will have in place to manage reporting, decision making, and finances across the partnership
- the financial health of your partner organisations and confirm they are financially solvent
- whether partners will have suitable policies in place such as safeguarding and whistleblowing
You and your partners will need to confirm you have a written agreement about how you’ll work together before we can pay you the funding. If you need it, you can use our partnership agreement template (Word document, 51 KB)
J. Capital requirements
If you are applying for more than £20,000 for the purchasing, refurbishing or developing of land and buildings or other construction-related works you need to complete the checklist in our land and buildings guidance (PDF, 681 KB).
Tell us how the project will consider environmental sustainability. You will need to read the land and buildings guidance to check whether you need to include an access plan and carbon savings plan.
K. Generous leadership
We want to fund organisations that support and help other organisations through a ‘generous leadership’ approach. Generous leadership means actively ensuring a positive environment for working together with other organisations and groups.
Tell us if you plan to take this approach. If so, we want to know how you plan to do this during the lifetime of your project. This could include:
- sharing evidence and data with other organisations with shared missions
- collaborating in other ways to achieve your mission such as sharing resources
- helping to advance skills in the sector
What happens next
Once we receive your response, your funding officer will assess it and will usually get in touch to ask you to clarify some areas. Once we have your response, it usually takes up to 3 months for us to make a final decision on your application.
When we have all the information we need to make a final decision, you’ll receive an email asking you and the senior contact to confirm that:
- your application is accurate and complete
- you’ll tell us about any changes
- the governing body of your organisation has authorised the application
- your organisation can deliver the project described
- you’ve had the chance to submit all the information you think is relevant for us to decide
We get many good applications, and we do not have enough money to fund them all. This means we have to make some tough decisions about who we can fund. We’ll consider what we know about the communities you are working with and how your application fits with what we have already funded.
If you receive funding, you’ll get more information about what to do next.