Why our small grants application is now one page

For years our smallest grant and our largest used the same application form. A group asking for £6,000 was answering the same fourteen questions as one asking for a quarter of a million.

We counted the cost properly last year: roughly thirty hours of unpaid volunteer time per application, for grants where thirty hours is a meaningful fraction of what the money buys. The form is now one page and the decision takes six weeks.

Applications to that programme have roughly doubled. About the same proportion succeed, which suggests the old form was filtering for bid-writing capacity rather than for merit.