The Big Lottery Fund (BIG) and charity directory The Big Give have entered a partnership which could see donations to Lottery-funded projects increase.

The collaboration will offer projects funded by the BIG's flagship Reaching Communities project in the last 12 months, or those with active grants, the opportunity to add a BIG logo to their listing on The Big Give website. The logo, BIG asserts, is "not a quality mark but is useful for donors carrying out further due diligence into a charity".

Projects supported by the Reaching Communities initiative have had to undergo a rigorous application process and the logo will provide an easy recognisable marker for philanthropists considering charities to fund on The Big Give.

Jon Brooks, managing director of The Big Give, said the collaboration will open up "a valuable source of information for donors".

Cath Lee, chief executive of the Small Charities Coalition told Civil Society that the move potentially provides a good opportunity for small charities but urged that the scheme should be spread across all of BIG's funding programmes and that The Big Give should also look to other similar funding programmes:

"This potentially is a good thing for small charities, providing the arrangement extends to all BIG’s funding programmes.  Many small charities receive Awards For All funding and so would get an extra push from this.

"Quite often smaller charities do not have such a high profile on websites like the Big Give as they find it harder to find the resource to maintain their pages, perhaps have fewer projects listed and also fewer people know them to do a specific search for them. So potentially this push could help with raising the profile of small charities. 

"We would ask though that the Big Give perhaps try to forge similar partnerships with other large funders who specifically support small charities and so extend this ‘extra push’ to more small charities," Lee added.