For projects of £5,000 or less your application will be considered under our Small Grants Programme which means you can proceed immediately to the full Stage 2 Application Form without having to fill in our preliminary Stage 1 Application Form. All funding requests for more than £5,000 will need to follow our two-stage application process.

We do not have specific limits to the size of awards. However, applications for very large amounts will generally only be successful if the organisation has successfully run Harpur Trust funded projects in the past and has discussed the project with the Trust for some time before applying. Applications for more than £50,000 in any one year need to be approved by our full Board of Trustees, which extends the decision-making period.

If you are unsure about what is a reasonable amount to ask for, look at our list on the 360 Grant Nav Report for a list of grants made in previous years. We encourage applicants to look at a broad range of funding sources, so you can ask The Harpur Trust to part fund your project.

Our Grants team will ask you a number of questions about your application and your organisation. We will discuss your application at one of our Grants meetings, where a range of issues will be looked at, including:

• Fit with our objectives and priorities.
• Need and demand for the project.
• Governance and finances.
• How well run the project is.
• How you assess whether you are making a difference.
• How you’re addressing inequality.
• If appropriate, we may ask other organisations about your work.

In some circumstances yes, but we advise organisations to continue to look for a wide range of funders. We do not guarantee repeat funding and we do not encourage groups to become dependent on our funding. However, we recognise that some organisations provide core and essential services and may provide regular funding on a longer-term basis, subject to regular reviews.

Yes you can apply for funding for more than one year, but we don’t usually fund applications for longer than three years.

Normally we would expect you to complete the first grant before applying for additional support. However, there may be some unusual situations in which we will consider applications for a second grant.

You are welcome to discuss your ideas with our Grants team. If they are all theoretically eligible we may suggest that you mention them all on your Stage 1 Application Form and ask for guidance. However, after discussion at a Grants meeting about your application we may come back and suggest that you need to decide which project is a priority for you.

Yes we will consider applications for core costs. We also are sympathetic to projects adopting a full cost recovery approach. Please see our Full cost recovery guidelines  on this.

We always try to give you feedback if your application has been unsuccessful. Like most funders, we find applications often fail because they:

• Have unclear legal status or weak governance arrangements; for example, a balance of power held by related Trustees.
• Haven’t answered specific questions raised by Trustees or supplied enough information for a decision to be made.
• Don’t demonstrate how they will work with and complement other services rather than duplicate them.
• Haven’t supplied convincing evidence of need for the project.
• Appear unsustainable in the long term.
• Have failed to provide monitoring information for previous projects funded by the Trust.

We encourage unsuccessful applicants to seek capacity building advice from specialist organisations such as The CVS Bedfordshire so they can improve their chances of success in future.
If you have been unsuccessful in the past and you’ve been able to address any issues raised previously, please do try again.

In your second stage application form you are asked to identify what you intend your project outcomes to be and then to explain in your final monitoring report whether you were successful in achieving those outcomes.

People often confuse outcomes with outputs and targets. Outcomes are the changes in the people, organisations, policies or communities your application aims to help that take place as a result of your work. The diagram below may be useful to try and explain what is meant by outcomes.

This is something you will need to think about when you are planning your project. Some people refer to the things which you can measure to demonstrate whether you have achieved your outcomes, as outcome indicators.

Some things are simpler to measure than others, and you need to make sure that you don’t choose outcome indicators which you can’t link directly to your work. For example, if you are running a project with the aim of raising the aspirations of young people in a particular area, with an outcome of reducing the numbers of young people drawn into criminal activity and you choose the outcome indicator of levels of reported crime and anti-social behaviour, how can you be sure that your project rather than any other initiatives being run locally are responsible for this change?

You should also consider whether your outcomes are measurable. Outcomes relating to a change in people’s attitudes, such as increased confidence, are sometimes called soft outcomes, and will often involve you checking people’s views before and after taking part in your project. There are a number of tools available to help with this sort of measurement which The CVS Bedfordshire can give you guidance on.

If you apply for funding for a building or equipment, the existence of a new extension or play equipment is not an outcome itself but an output. Think about why you need the building or equipment for your community or service users. Outcomes for a new building project could be an increased number of groups using the building, improved financial sustainability, or perhaps improved access for disabled people.