Three ways we plan to make funding easier

David Kane and Suraj Vadgama, the team behind www.beehivegiving.org, share findings from their recent user research with charitable funders and plans to put them into action to make funding easier and less time-consuming.

Beehive was set up by The Forward Foundation that understood the challenges of distributing grants, as well as the difficulties faced by applicants seeking their support. Fast forward and Beehive – a web based tool that checks and matches charitable organisations with eligible and appropriate funders – has helped over 12,000 projects.

Conscious of our heritage, and that we think the tool can work for funders as well as charitable organisations, we recently conducted some user research to kick start the development of ‘Beehive for Funders’ (working title). Here are three things we discovered and a sneak peek of some solutions we hope to build this summer…

Ineligible and unsuitable applicants

Funder verification concept from ‘Beehive for Funders’

The Directory of Social Change estimates that ineligible applications made to the largest trusts in 2010 equated to seven years of wasted effort. According to the latest figures from the Big Lottery Fund, 46% of applications to its Reaching Communities programme between May and July this year were ineligible. This pointless exertion is something we want to address through our funder verification system. Building on our user’s favorite features we’re currently improving our system of semi-automated eligibility and suitability checking to solve this problem.

These features use a combination of open data, and funders’ criteria to semi-automatically determine the eligibility and suitability of an applicant based on many key decision factors such as location, amount sought, beneficiary target, etc. It’s the only system of its kind, and the approach is entirely unique as far as we know.

Internal reporting

Funder dashboard concept from ‘Beehive for Funders’

Being able to monitor, report and share information on the performance of funds is time consuming and difficult for funders. We’re working on a simple dashboard to help funders internally evaluate and share details about how well their funding of charities has performed with controls to easily make changes for better applicant targeting.

Context

Funder insights concept from ‘Beehive for Funders’

Due diligence and understanding the context relevant to an applicant can be time-consuming and involve a lot manual research. We’re working on making it quick and easy to uncover relevant insights about an applicant, focusing on key areas of interest to funders such as deprivation and the notion of ‘funding cold spots’.

A key criteria when we embark on the development of new features is whether our solution contributes something new to the problem space – we’re confident and excited that the features we have in the pipeline are unique, and would love your feedback, so drop us a line at support@beehivegiving.org.

Dave and Suraj