Fund Gloucestershire offers clear and simple services to improve the experience of giving and receiving funds for funders, VCSE organisations and community groups alike.

Our services at a glance

Funding application platform

Our digital platform helps funders reach VCSE organisations and community groups across Gloucestershire through clear, targeted and trusted funding processes.

By bringing opportunities together in one place and securely storing applicant information and documents, we make funding easier for applicants to find and apply for. Our optional automated eligibility, due diligence and criteria checks enable funders to focus their time and attention on decision-making, to ensure that their funding reaches local communities effectively.

Fund Stewardship

Our stewardship service enables funders and VCSE organisations to place funds securely with Fund Gloucestershire until they are ready to be distributed either via direct payments or funding programmes.

We can hold ring-fenced funding, make authorised payments and, where needed, set up and administer a funding programme through our digital platform. This gives funders time to develop a clear and purposeful approach, while reducing the financial and administrative burden on VCSE organisations and partnerships.

Our services in practice

Our services for applicants

For applicants, we offer a streamlined application platform which significantly reduces the administrative burden of applying for funds.

One profile for all funds - applicants create their core organisational profile once. We save key information and documents to use across all applications.

Clear application journey - applicants know what to expect at each stage of the application process, including eligibility, questions, documents required, and the funder's decision-making processes.

Application tracker and reminders by email - our platform shows key deadlines and live updates to track application progress and enable organisations to plan ahead. Email reminders regarding incomplete applications, application progress, and updating documents close to expiry help applicants stay on top of funding applications.

Personalised feedback - we will work with funders to encourage feedback to applicants to help strengthen future applications.

Simplified impact reporting - a centralised and simple impact reporting process means less time writing reports and more time to deliver impact.

Transparent and responsible use of AI - we will always tell you if funders are using AI and how they are using it. Our platform offers funders the option to use simple AI checks for due diligence and criteria matching in a purpose-led, transparent, and human-centred way. Decisions on funding are made by the funder.

Our services for funders

For funders, we offer our Applicant Management service, and our Fund Stewardship service.

Application Management service

We offer an end-to-end Application Management service for funders, including: full support to set-up, manage and administer a fund; automated eligibility checking; an option to use AI to carry out due diligence and criteria matching; and set-up of grant agreements and payments

We collaborate with funders to build and manage the application process, tailored to their requirements.

Funders always have full control over fund decision-making and allocation and retain the relationship with applicants.

Fund Stewardship services

A simple, neutral, independent mechanism to hold funds until funders are ready to distribute them either through direct payments to partnerships or organisations, or a grant-funding programme administered on our platform

Onward fund management in line with funder specifications and governance arrangements, or as a new funding programme

Our approach to using AI

Our approach to automation and AI

Using technology to do what technology does best and humans to do what humans do best.

Automation and AI can help make some parts of the funding process faster and more efficient, but we recognise that it is not right for every task.

Our platform uses automation to run eligibility checks against funder criteria. We also offer funders the option to use AI to run due diligence checks and criteria matching of applications, where it could add value or aid efficiency.

The AI model we use will never train on, or store, your data - this ensures the utmost confidentiality, privacy and security of user data. Human judgement, local knowledge and relationships remain central to the fund application process, particularly where context and discretion matter.

The processes we use are based only on data that applicants provide to Fund Gloucestershire, and/or data which is provided by specific feeds from the Charity Commission and Companies House databases. The AI approach we use does not involve searching for or scraping data about organisations or projects from the wider internet.

People-centred decision making

Improving efficiency without replacing human oversight or compromising on fairness.

The way we have used technology in our funding platform is designed to improve the efficiency and reduce the workload of grant-making where appropriate, so that funders can spend more time focusing on the impact that they want their funds to achieve. We believe that judgement and decision-making are best done by people.

That’s why at Fund Gloucestershire, nothing AI is being used to do is designed to ‘take over’ human roles, but rather to support the workload of the application process. AI does not make decisions about grants in our funding application service, where a blend of proportionate automated checks and human judgment is essential to support fair and considered decision-making.

Fund Gloucestershire’s Directors have experience of working on both the funder and applicant side of the fence. We combine our practical understanding of the funding environment in Gloucestershire with active listening and ongoing learning, so we can continue to improve our services and shape them around the needs of VCSE organisations, community groups and funders.

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