Context
Historic England (HE) is the public body and executive advisor for England's historic heritage. Historic England was hiring a new grant manager for its heritage conservation fund. In a bid for the role, our client would propose why they were best equipped to manage £250,000 of grants.
Challenge
The client is an established organization with international experience in grant management, but this would be their first project in the UK. Our role was to write a convincing proposal that would help our Client break into the UK grant management market.
Outcome
We designed a step-by-step plan process to distribute grants to heritage projects for maximum impact. We also designed the framework to monitor, forecast, and evaluate the impact of every grant dollar.
Process
Understanding the context. We first started by thoroughly reviewing HE's existing grant delivery process. Instead of rewriting everything, we wanted to find ways to complement their current strategy. The main questions we answered in our proposal were:
How can the research and administration processes be done more cost-effectively?
How would the client's expertise in international grant management lend itself to HE's impact on local heritage and cultural initiatives?
What can we do to improve HE's grant delivery strategy? How will we assess their outcomes and impacts?
Plotting resources and recovery. Our drafting process was completed at a time of increasing economic uncertainty, which meant that we had to quickly integrate challenges exacerbated by Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the stress this put on overall heritage funding, it was vital for us to ensure that the UK taxpayer funds we would be responsible for were spent efficiently.
Global expertise, local experts. We also collaborated with local charities, changemakers, and grant recipients to inform our processes. This involved networking with and identifying relevant best practices from similar grant givers. By combining the client's international experience in grant management with the insight of local stakeholders, we designed more cost-effective and transparent processes.
Maximizing impact. Our impact evaluation would also analyze the cost of administration against the impact of the funding to achieve greater efficiency in budget spending.
Thinking ahead. We also want to anticipate what HE's future concerns would be. We identified risks and made recommendations to improve HE's current processes, such as overlooked opportunities to enhance the diversity of applicants.
Proposal Writing, Program Design
Service:
Location:
Western Europe
