Our Services
Finding and securing funding
The Bright Ideas Partnership facilitates charities to find and secure funding, measure their impact, demonstrate their social value and strengthen their organisation.
We also provide mentoring support to enable you to write your funding application in-house.
Bright Ideas has a success rate of 50% for funding applications submitted, significantly higher than the industry average and represents excellent value for money, delivering £25.37 for every £1 invested in us.
Over a three year period Walton Charity has funded a number of development/fundraising projects in partner organisations. With Bright Ideas' support these organisations have been successfully enabled to obtain significant funding which has helped secure their service delivery over a number of years. Jo is an extremely professional, well organised and competent consultant. She is also friendly and flexible. Her results speak for themselves.
Applying to the National Lottery Community Fund
We specialise in applications to the National Lottery Community Fund on behalf of a wide range of not-for-profits including organisations who have never before secured large amounts of grant funding.
In our 19-year experience, we have submitted 63 successful Lottery bids – securing over £13.6m in funding, with a 98% success rate at second stage.
We like the team’s approach because they focused on building our capacity and were quick to find ways to save our money rather than spend more with them. Our biggest success with Bright Ideas has been securing a three year Reaching Communities grant for our Community Hub worth £237,000. Since working with Bright Ideas we have tripled our income.
Measuring impact
In the last 14 years, we have externally evaluated £9million worth of programmes working with over 24,000 beneficiaries. Many of these projects were receiving National Lottery Community Funding.
We also understand the on-the-ground constraints of monitoring for small charities with limited resources, so we help organisations to ‘set up’ and review monitoring and evaluation systems to ensure they are fit for purpose.
Jo’s objective view of the project and its outcomes gives me, as Project Manager, a clearer view of where improvements can be made and where success is achieved, or not, as the case may be. As a project we have been able to implement developmental ideas and suggestions which have enabled us to be more focussed and successful.
Measuring social value
We develop Cost Benefit Analyses often as part of the external evaluations we work on. The purpose of a Cost Benefit Analysis is to place a value on the social, economic and environment outcomes of a charity or project, so that charities can understand that for every £1 spent on their service delivers £xx of 'social value'. This allows organisations to demonstrate their social value to stakeholders, funders and supporters. The Bright Ideas Partnership is also a Social Value Pioneer with Social Value UK.
The cost benefit analysis that Bright Ideas undertook of our Targeted Referrals project was timely as it evidenced not only that the project was good value for money, but that it actually generated benefits above and beyond the amount invested in it – something that has been impactful at a time when the project was being reviewed and re-commissioned.
Strengthening your organisation
Many small charities are facing reduced funding but increased demand; to respond, and survive, charities need to be resilient, strong and stable. We are experts at enabling clients to improve their performance and build their sustainability.
We do this through developing business plans, undertaking organisational reviews and through mentoring senior staff.
We needed a strengths and weaknesses review following a successful National Lottery Community Fund bid. Bright Ideas provided an independent assessment of the organisation’s strengths and weaknesses, and made recommendations for areas where we could invest time and money to achieve improvements. Since working with Bright Ideas we have changed in a number of ways. We now provide more activities for our members. In support of this, we have expanded the management team; we have stronger financial reporting and control systems; and we have upgraded several areas of governance.