The Directory of Social Change developed a version of a central data bank for charities applying for government grants as part of the governmentfunding.org.uk project, but the Home Office scrapped it just before it got to the testing stage.
The online grant application management tool took around two years to develop and was ready in mid-2006. The tool was dual-facing – with an applicant-facing side which started with a standard application form, and a grant-administrator side whereby individual grants administrators could set up their own accounts.
Applicants could bring up an application form, fill it out and automatically populate it with data from their profile. If they then applied for another grant programme later, much of the form would be automatically completed for them.
Joining up across government
Once the fundraiser submitted their application, the grant administrator would get an email alert, so they could log in and look at all the applications forms on the database and set up a scoring form for each one. “Basically it aimed to replicate the existing offline process, online,” said Ben Wittenberg, the DSC’s head of policy and research. “And it aimed to provide some joining-up across government departments.”
It was funded out of the £400,000 budget that the then-Active Community Unit (ACU) in the Home Office allocated to the DSC to create www.governmentfunding.org.uk – the central website that aims to be the first port of call for anybody applying for any kind of government grant.
But the idea got as far as booking a day to test it before it got canned, said Wittenberg. “The department-facing database was declared out-of-scope.”
He said the ACU seemed to realise it didn’t have enough clout to force other government agencies to use it. “They didn’t even have buy-in from their part of the Home Office. And the person responsible for it changed every six months, so by the time they got to grips with it they were gone.”
DSC ‘could revive it’
If any funder expressed an interest in reviving it, it could “quite quickly be something we could involve ourselves in”, Wittenberg said. “But on our own it would be an enormous undertaking.” The best way to take it forward now would be for some independent funders, foundations or corporates, to team up and test it out, he suggested.
Wittenberg told Charity News Alert about the initiative in response to a story last month in which Trevor Lockwood, director of Social Enterprise East of England, suggested that the sector should set up a central data bank of applicant information for funders to access. This would save charities huge amounts of form-filling time, he said.
Les Hems, director of GuideStar’s data and analysis arm, also submitted a response to Lockwood’s suggestion. He said: “GuideStar promoted this idea about two years ago and hoped the ‘lead funder’ project headed by DWP and DFES would deliver a mechanism that created standardisation and removed wasteful duplication.
“GuideStar already offers such a document deposit service for charities. We are also actively trying to engage with local government and grant-making trusts to use this and other information held by GuideStar – so that we can fulfil the role of an ‘information brokerage’.”
