Tell us about your project in a clear, concise way. We aren’t looking for professional bid-writers who can use complex language. We just want to know what you are doing, and how it will help improve life for local people.

Every good project should start with a need. Think about what challenges the people you work with face. What do they experience in their lives and what does that mean for them? For example, you could tell us that you work with young people living in a deprived community. But a strong application would go a bit deeper than that. How does the deprivation affect the lives of these young people? How does it make them feel and shape their experience of the world? Does it have long term impacts?

Often, you can back this up with studies or data. But sometimes it’s good to tell us exactly what you know and have seen first-hand. We work with organisations who see these challenges on a daily basis, and we want to hear about your expertise from your day-to-day work.

We are a local funder and want to support organisations who are at the heart of local communities. The strongest applications will always demonstrate this. If you apply for work in an area where you haven’t worked before, or where you aren’t based, we’ll always look to understand why you are best placed to deliver that work, instead of someone local, or rooted in that community.

Sometimes applications give us a huge amount of information, but we still don’t know exactly what the project will do. In sector terms, this is sometimes called the ‘output’. Make sure that things like the number of sessions, who you will work with, and how the money will be spent are always as clear as possible.

For a lot of projects, we understand that flexibility is required, and you might not have 100% of the details at the point of the application. That’s okay. But it is still a good idea to explain what your options are, and how you will clarify these points further down the line.

All the projects we fund need to fill in monitoring forms. This is usually at the end of your project, but sometimes we will ask for them at other stages too. These forms are how we understand the outcomes and the impact your grant has made. We use these to help us learn, become a better funder, and in our storytelling to help us raise even more money to fund more projects.

When you apply, we’ll ask you about your outcomes (the positive difference you make in peoples lives) and the indicators (what you will look for to show you have made achieved this). We will ask you to report back on these in your monitoring forms. Good monitoring can’t be achieved at the end of your project. You have to have strong data and clear records from start to finish. That’s why we’ll want to know your plans for this before you begin.

We work with a variety of organisations across Cheshire. This ranges from small, volunteer-led community groups, through to multi-million-pound charities. We always expect a proportionate amount of planning and information with any application. For example, a large mental health charity planning a year-long series of county-wide interventions working with victims of youth violence would need to provide us a lot more detail than a youth club asking for £2,000 to run a holiday club.

We want to see that you have spoken to the people who will benefit and taken their views on board. This is a great opportunity to understand the experiences of people you work with and use them to shape the planning process. Nobody understands challenges as well as people with lived experience, so we believe their input is key.

Not every project needs to change the world. Projects which deliver deep sector-wide impact are just as valuable as projects which make long-lasting impact to a small community. We believe everybody deserves a fuller, more enriched life. If you can make that difference to someone, we want to hear about it.

Numbers aren’t everything. We don’t believe that bigger numbers necessarily mean a better project. It’s the quality of your outcomes that matter.

At the end of your project, you’ll be asked to report on the numbers in your application. So be honest about the number of people who you think you will make a difference for.

Make sure you have the capacity to deliver your project. We would rather fund a smaller, well planned project than an overly ambitious one which might be difficult to deliver. Make sure you have the right skills and experience in place before submitting your application to us. If you don’t, you’ll need to show us a clear picture of where you will find them, either through recruitment or outsourcing part of your project.

All our funded work will contribute to our five pillars, vision, mission, and values. You can find out more about these in our Cheshire 2030 document.

As a funder, we have also committed to the IVAR Flexible Funder principles of Open and Trusting Grantmaking. You can find out more information about these here.