Information for applicants not offered funding
If you’re not offered funding in our 2023-26 Investment Programme, there’s still ways we can support your organisation. Here, you can find some resources that you might find useful when you receive your decision from us.
Information for applicants offered funding
Understanding your decision
As we set out in the guidance for the 2023-26 Investment Programme, we expected to receive many more strong applications than we could fund. This was indeed the case.
We received a record-breaking number of applications that requested more funding than our original budget. We increased the budget to enable us to support more organisations, but despite dedicating £446 million per year to this programme, we still had to choose between good, fundable applications.
To do this, we considered how best to use our budget to ensure we have a group of organisations that is high quality, well placed to deliver Let’s Create and achieves our aims of being more representative of this country. We call this process ‘balancing’.
We used a balancing criteria which was set out in the guidance for applicants. This provided a framework for us to use to determine how organisations individually and collectively might contribute to the delivery of Let’s Create.
We were able to make the portfolio of organisations more representative of the geography of England by investing in high quality organisations based and/or delivering in our Priority Places and Levelling Up for Culture Places. These are places of historically low Arts Council investment and places of low cultural engagement, with a consideration for the spread across the country and between rural, towns and cities.
We have increased our investment in high quality organisations with leadership and governance that is more representative of England, while considering disability, race, sex and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
We have also been able to support a wide range of creative and cultural provision, across artforms and disciplines, while ensuring we have a good balance between arts organisations, museums and libraries, and types of organisation, such as that are building-based, touring and festivals. This applied to both National Portfolio Organisations, who will deliver Let’s Create’s Outcomes and their Elements, as well as through our Investment Principles Support Organisations, to ensure a good spread of support offered by organisations who will help others to embed the Investment Principles.
Resources we can offer you
If you’re not offered funding in our 2023-26 Investment Programme, there’s still ways we can support your organisation. On the following sections, you can find some resources that you might find useful when you receive your decision from us.
Resources
The Investment Principles Resource Hub provides blogs, podcasts, case studies, toolkits and more to help inform the development of well-run and future-facing organisations. This information is online for any organisation or individuals working in creativity and culture.
Have you met our Digital Culture Network? It’s here to develop your organisation’s digital skills and explore the benefits of technology. Tech Champions provide specialist support in digital strategy, digital marketing, social media, eCommerce, data analytics and insight, search engine marketing, websites, content creation, CRM and ticketing, and email marketing.
You might find our resources around resilience and wellbeing useful. Take a look at our guidance on caring for your workforce and making fair decisions in a time of rapid change and our toolkit on supporting your wellbeing.
Environmental, audience and evaluation data collection tools
To help achieve Let’s Create, the creative and cultural sector needs access to good data collection tools as well as guidance and support to embed new ways of working. To secure the best tools possible, we ran an open and competitive procurement process.
Julie’s Bicycle will deliver our Environmental Responsibility Programme - a suite of tools, resources and thought leadership programming. This includes the Creative Green Tools, a platform to allow you to collect your environmental data, calculate your carbon footprint and undertake carbon forecasting. Alongside this, the programme will include resources, support and training with a particular focus on environmental governance and climate justice. The programme will help you identify your organisation’s priorities for climate action and make measurable and tangible improvements over time.
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) will deliver a new audience data collection and insights platform. You will be able to gather audience data through surveys and box office connections, and access meaningful insights about who engages with your activities. Automated functionality and a range of insights will be free to access and there will be resources and support to help you make the most of the tool. You’ll be able to easily upload this information throughout the year and see your audience-related data in one place.
Counting What Counts will support data-led, quality evaluation through the Impact & Insight Toolkit (IIT). This tool captures data and provides users with insights into what audiences, participants, peers and creative practitioners think about the work they produce. Alongside this, there will be free access to resources, training and developmental support to enable organisations to explore and develop their quality evaluation processes through the framework
Complementing this will be an expansion of the Digital Culture Network. We’ll recruit two new Tech Champions who’ll help the sector make better use of data, particularly relating to in-person and online audiences.
Funding
Take a look at our open funds to find out what other sources of funding we offer, including National Lottery Project Grants – our fund is open all year round which invests in large and small-scale projects in communities across England.
If you are a National Portfolio Organisation or Sector Support Organisation in the 2018-23 portfolio, you can apply to the Transition Programme from Monday 7 November 2022 until Tuesday 28 February 2023. This programme enables eligible organisations to apply for additional financial support to help them exit the portfolio.
Keeping in touch
We’ll make sure you know about further resources, programmes or funding opportunities that become available and we think might be useful for you.
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If you have any questions, our Customer Services team will be happy to help.