Grants in Australia - Annual Report 2017 (AUS)

19/02/2018

To access this report: Click Here

Authors: Our Community Pty Ltd, Melbourne, VIC. 

Published: July 2017.

Background to the Research:

About a fifth of state and federal government expenditure is in the form of grants and that proportion has continued to increase over the last few years.  Against this backdrop, the 9th ‘Grants in Australia Report’ charts the development of the field and provides useful insights and benchmarks for the grant seeking and grant making community.

Objectives:

  1. To provide trends, insights and benchmarks for grants and the grant making process, to assist in the improvement of outcomes and processes regarding grant making.

Methodology:

An online survey of not-for-profit groups across Australia who had applied for at least one grant in the previous 12 months. 

The 1227 participants in 2017 were invited to share their experiences of grant seeking as well as their interactions with the grant making system.

Key Outcomes/Findings:

  • The larger the not-for-profit organisation, the more grants it is likely to have applied for. Large organisations are not just winning large grants, they’re scooping up many of the small grants on offer as well. The evidence suggests that larger grant seekers are more likely to seek help in the grant seeking process by attending pre-application briefings, asking for feedback on their specific applications and seeking out information on deadlines, word limits and the ‘nuts and bolts’ of applying and this is likely to be a key factor in achieving a higher success levels.

  • State and territory governments are the most relied-upon source of grants, but their importance is declining over time, while local government is becoming a more important source of grants.

  • Grants provided by corporate entities have not yet recovered to the levels seen before the global financial crisis.

  • Not-for-profit organisations are generally reporting either stable or increasing grant seeking success, however around a quarter reported a downturn in grants received.

  • The main factors inhibiting organisations from applying for more grants were lack of resource and time, however the survey revealed that a huge amount of time is being wasted on unsubmitted applications, with around 54% of respondents indicating that they had started an application that they did not submit.

  • The survey this year sought to discover more about unsubmitted applications with the aim of providing some advice to both grant seekers and grant makers about how wastage could be reduced, and these were the key findings:
    - To a large extent the fault sits with the grant seekers with over a third responding that the reason they did not submit their application was because they ran out of time.
    - There are some steps that grant makers could take to prevent time wastage - 16% of respondents dropped out of the process part way through when they discovered that they did not fit the eligibility requirements, whilst a further 27% discovered that the program wasn’t right for them, indicating that more effort could be made to explain the program’s purpose and eligibility. Grant makers could do this by improving the availability and clarity of guidelines, and by inserting eligibility tests.

  • The perception is that multi-year grants and grants for core costs are getting harder to get, despite ongoing campaigns to encourage more of this type of funding. Building relationships with grant makers was one of the key components to achieving success in this area with successful grant seekers being more likely to form relationships with grant makers than unsuccessful grant seekers.   Advice given to grant makers in terms of improving the ability of organisations to create relationships with them included:
    • Providing a single point of contact for grant seekers.
    • Improving the timeliness of responses to queries.
    • Better provision of useful and relevant feedback on unsuccessful applications.
  • More grant recipients are being forced to pay for their own post evaluation, with only 12% receiving specific funding for this from the grant maker. 40% of grant seekers believed that grant makers’ provision of funding for outcomes measurement and reporting/evaluation was inadequate, compared with 22% who felt it was sufficient.