Listening to Grantees

We want to give the best possible service to those who apply to us for grants. To check how we are doing we commissioned DJS Research to investigate.   They carried out 100 telephone surveys in October/November 2018 and in January 2019 we received the anonymised results. 
 
The full report can be viewed here. 
 
The results were overwhelmingly positive and have identified things we want to improve on.

• Only 8% found the application form quite hard or very hard to use
• Only 4% found the guidance notes not very clear or not clear at all
• 97% of organisations and 81% of individuals believed that we asked for a reasonable amount of information to support their application
• 97% of grantees received their grants promptly
• 92% of grantees felt that the amount of post-grant monitoring information required was reasonable
• Most grantees felt the level of contact they had from the Grants Team was ‘about right’ (organisations - 91%; individuals – 88%)

 
We’re delighted with the findings. Still, we want to make things better. We plan to:

• Simplify processes for individual applicants who are existing grantees by reducing our information requirements. We are looking at a multi-year model for grants to new university students and we shall try to reduce the questions we ask.
• Improve the level of contact we have with individual grantees. We plan annual contact to see how things are going.  We’ll also expand the way in which we explain those occasions when we cannot make a grant.
• Make our information clearer. We’ve already begun planning changes to content on our website and in the online application form for individual grantees