By Tom Steinberg: a Stroudie who lives for better grantmaking
I’m one half an organisation called Modern Grantmaking, and we’re very proud of our grantmaking crystal ball, which we bartered for a very reasonable price from a shadowy figure at a Gloucestershire crossroads (Bulls Cross) at midnight.
Recently we’ve been staring into our grantmaking crystal ball to ask what grantseekers and grantmakers in Gloucestershire might expect from the next couple of years. Here’s what we see emerging from the swirling mists.
Council mergers causing grief and very sudden opportunities
You might have heard that all the district and borough councils in Gloucestershire are being abolished and merged into a single county council – at least this was the case right up to the point where everything was put on pause.
Our prediction is that this will eventually un-pause and the mooted council mergers will still happen in some way that’s roughly similar to what’s already been announced. But despite this uncertainty, from a grantmaking perspective we think two things are almost for sure.
First, when local governments and their employees are thrown into uncertainty by mergers a lot of stuff just stops happening. So we expect to see at least a year, maybe two years in which there’s just simply fewer local council-based funding pots, rounds and ultimately grants than in peacetime. This will be very hard on some nonprofits, and there will likely be stories about surprise closures of organisations that have relied on some council fund for a long time. But conversely, we also expect that sudden spasms of potentially very generous grantmaking will happen with painfully short deadlines as sleep-deprived council finance teams suddenly realise there’s a budget line that really needs shovelling out the door ASAP if their spreadsheets are going to look tip top for The Big Doomsday of Budget Judgement that will happen when all the councils are finally smashed together.
Then on top of this, we have a new national government that is unprecedentedly pledged to devolution. This will probably drop new chunks of unexpected money (and again, short-term money) into the system to make sure that Devolution Works and Devolution Is Seen To Work. In a sentence: be prepared for unpredictable famine and feast on the local government funding side, and if you want to prosper be incredibly nice to your stressed friends and contacts inside councils (who won’t be having the easiest of times) and who could be your essential allies when sudden gobbets of money unexpectedly appear.
Inflation and energy prices
Due to all the shenanigans going on far away in the Gulf of Hormuz, things are going to be getting more expensive for charities and nonprofits in Gloucestershire. The Bank of England expects prices to rise even quicker within the rest of this year and into next, and then really after that – well even our crystal ball doesn’t know, but it doesn’t look optimistic.
This is tough for grantees who often don’t have any routine inflationary increases baked into their grants, or if they do they are often set based on slightly optimistic assumptions that nobody will launch a war and so prices won’t shoot up unexpectedly. It’s also worth noting that inflation hurts different charities and community groups differently – if you run a community minibus scheme then the recent rapid rise in diesel is a real killer, whereas a foodbank may have a slightly easier time, food inflation is currently actually quite low. But very few charities will come out of next winter without heating prices having caused unwanted stresses.
More AI on both sides of the application form
Thanks to AI, the actual act of writing funding applications has never been easier, and we predict that writing really great applications is only going to get easier still, especially as AI tools start to get access to the internal emails and documents of charities, to help pull together fact-based and convincing cases. This is great news for anyone who finds writing funding applications tedious, difficult and intimidating (i.e. basically everyone).
The unfortunate flip side of this is that success rates for funding applications are doomed to go down, because AI doesn’t magically produce more money to make grants with, even as it does magically create more high quality funding applications. Even more problematic, we expect that more and more funders will close their open funding programmes entirely due to feeling they just can’t cope with the levels of AI-boosted interest. This is one reason why Fund Gloucestershire is such an important new initiative, because it is helping funders to keep open programmes working in the AI era.
The greatest single paradox of how AI influences grantmaking is that as funders struggle to cope with the influx, they will be more likely to grant to organisations they have a trusting human relationship with. So as an applicant don’t let the sheer ease of AI lull you into a sense that you don’t need to spend a certain amount of time pounding pavements and pressing flesh.
Sadly our crystal ball is starting to cloud back over, and so that marks the end of our predictions. What do you reckon will be happening in local grantmaking in the next couple of years?