Twenty years ago, while running a world‑class London orchestra, I learned a lesson about grant-making that has stayed with me until this day. An Arts Council official told me that our application, although excellent, had been unsuccessful because ACE had received too many applicants from London and not enough from the North West and North East. There was also too many music applicants compared to other artforms. “But there are more arts organisations in London”, I protested, to no avail of course. When I checked the grant awards list, I found funding in the north going to a wide range of grass-roots community arts, circus and street dance groups who were all no doubt delivering excellent work, but who in scale, catchment and reach didn’t quite compare. (the fact that the orchestra happened to have a London office, but most of its concerts were outside London and even outside of the UK made it even more galling).
Don’t worry, this isn’t another blog about Arts Council’s interpretation of “excellence” (although that would feel very timely), this is about the balancing criteria that many funders apply in the name of fairness that can often feel distinctly unfair.
Balancing criteria are used by many funders across the entire charitable sector to spread awards across geography, socioeconomic indicators, or types of beneficiaries. They’re intended to promote an equal spread of grants, widen access, and support underserved places.
But it is only properly “fair” if these criteria would be applied after the assessment has been completed. In other words; if the final selection is made only between applications which all on their merit would have been strong enough to win a grant. If feels distinctly unfair if, for example, a strong application from London loses out against an average application that would never have been successful if it hadn’t come from a left-behind area. Whether this is the case, applicants will obviously never find out.
We are all familiar with the grant-making institutions who prioritise disadvantaged places and express a preference for applicants from areas within a certain “decile of deprivation”. There is some fairness in that argument, and one can understand a funder’s decision to prioritise areas where they feel the need is highest and therefore their funding achieves the greatest impact. The trouble is that, by making it explicit, they’ll have discouraged 80% of applicants from applying. It breeds an attitude of despondency; many clients have said to me: “We’ll never get that grant with our post-code; we’re not poor enough..” We can wonder if that is a deliberate objective in the current landscape where grant-makers are increasingly overwhelmed by the number of applications they receive.
For most fundraisers, researching IMD stats as part of the case development has become second nature, but there is now an increasing importance attached to Community Needs Index; Having familiarised myself with the CNI it seems to offer a small step towards the fairness we are all looking for.
The CNI is not just IMD with a new badge. Where the IMD tells you how deprived people are, the CNI can tell you how deprived the place is of the things that could help communities function or indeed recover. This is important and it could benefit charities and applicants who are not in an IMD-style deprived area and help them demonstrate to funders that their needs are real.
A quick and simple example: Wealthy areas can contain significant hidden needs. Statistics consistently show that affluent areas often have higher proportions of single‑person and single‑pensioner households and these demographics correlate strongly with loneliness, isolation, depression, and mental health and alcohol‑related harm. Even when – or especially when – deprivation scores appear low.
And that is the key. The CNI allows room for the kind of nuance that the IMD can’t always provide. A poor area might be well-provisioned with local charities, volunteers and infrastructure assets to deal effectively with that poverty, but vice-versa, an area that might appear wealthy can lack the resources, resilience or infrastructure to deal with urgent local needs.
Of course, it is true that wealthier areas often have greater capacity to secure local fundraising support, but it would be wrong for funders to conclude that these charities can therefore “look after themselves”. It would effectively penalise organisations for successful fundraising. Strong local fundraising should be seen as reducing a funder’s risk and an indicator of deliverability. If a charity has already mobilised significant support, penalising that success discourages that resilience and deep local engagement than in many cases has taken years to build.
So, would it not be better to reverse the deprivation argument altogether? Some funders, like Benefact Trust already do that. After shortlisting applications on merit, the trust applies an uplift for those applicants based in areas of deprivation; in other words, it rewards organisations facing tougher circumstances rather than penalises those that may have successfully mobilised local resources.
A wealthy postcode might contain a small, struggling project; a deprived area might host a flagship institution. Both are addressing urgent needs in their local area, whether that is a deprived urban area or leafy suburbia.
I know that many of us can’t resist telling trust funders and institutional grant-makers what to do, but allow me to add my own suggestions for how to address this tricky balancing act:
- More transparency about weighting: Publish how much geography, deprivation indices, or local capacity affects scores and when in the assessment the balancing criteria are applied.
- Turn the blunt economic deprivation tool on its head; focus on the need, wherever it occurs and apply an uplift in left-behind areas.
- Reward strong local fundraising capacity. If you want low-risk investment and deliverability, it’s a no-brainer.
- Look at CNI stats rather than IMD; it allows for more nuance in the needs assessment and makes room for contextual adjustments.
- Publish regional success rates and rationale on a rolling basis, so applicants can see where the funder has recently invested, and where it hasn’t.
