Public Engagement: Do small grants still matter?

Small grants go back to the early days of public engagement and outreach. Almost everyone who has developed public engagement and outreach work will have applied for a small pot of money internally or from an external funder at some point. The public engagement and outreach landscape has changed in the last decade with evolving practice and funding innovation alongside more traditional approaches. This year’s Interact Symposium brought a great cross-section of practitioners, researchers and funders together in a roundtable allowing us to consider as a community, in this changing landscape 'Do small grants still matter?' 

What do we mean when we call an award a 'small grant'?

Our understanding of what a small grant is can vary substantially based on professional and organisational context, and the level of maturity of a piece of work. Funders on award-making panels consider 'small' to range from hundreds to tens of thousands of pounds; we did not see a singular definition. People delivering public engagement and outreach also reflected that, at the beginning of a project, a grant of hundreds of pounds can seem significant, but when a project is more mature, a grant of tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds may never feel quite as big as that first grant. 

Where do small grants fit in?

Small grants can support work in diverse settings, with diverse audiences, participants, and partners using a variety of methods from the tried and tested to innovative approaches. Funders, community organisations, education settings, freelancers, and universities all have their own priorities, but what we heard consistently in the conversation was about the role of small grants in:

• Providing an entry point into public engagement and outreach for individuals, organisations, and communities either new to the practice or topic matter.
• Getting work started with a small grant lends credibility to the activity and can justify staff time to get a project off the ground.
• Testing, trialilng, and scaling of new-to-audience/participant/partner, new-to-organisation, or new-to-sector content, approaches, and strategies.

We also heard reflections from project leaders about the value of being able to apply for grants within the ‘small’ range from a variety of sizes. They felt this helped to move them from proof of initial concept, to a wider offer with greater impact. This was not without its challenges from the investment of time in application and evaluation to the difficulty in knowing where to go and where to look for funding opportunities, particularly when transitioning from smaller to larger grants.

Sourcing funding opportunities, the amount of funding available, and the likelihood of success will always be at the front of people’s minds. However, how funding is made available and how you make the funding process itself valuable came through as important considerations in weighing the value of small grants.

We heard about examples of approaches that work in different funding contexts that: 

• “De-risk” the funding process: colleagues at the British Science Association have tested a new two-stage approach to funding community organisations, after learning from Round 1 of The Ideas Fund. This reduces the initial burden of being considered, and then offers funding to support project development and relationship building for shortlisted applicants. The second stage also looks to remove financial competitiveness within the decision-making stage, to foster collaboration among applicants, and reduce wasted effort on all sides.
• Build relationships: treating funding as a two-way exchange, where possible, ensuring the funding process itself returns value for applicants and not just grant holders. The importance of feedback to projects and the value of building a cohort around successful awards were both highlighted as realising additional value from small grants and small grant programmes. However, the resource implications for funders in managing programmes were highlighted as a barrier in times when finances were tight.

We discussed the challenges of:

• Managing burden: proportionality, what is asked for at what stage and at what level of detail vs the amounts available and the flexibility or not that funders have to adjust those expectations. For some funders systems restricted their ability to reduce burden sufficiently to reasonably fund the smaller end of small grants.
• Reach and demand: ensuring that funding opportunities reach the breadth of eligible organisations, while managing funding demand and applicant expectations was highlighted as a delicate balance. 
• Sustainability: those developing and delivering projects highlighted gaps in the public engagement and outreach ecosystem particularly when projects mature out of a funding stream. 

The consensus is 'yes'! Small grants make a difference to people, places, and communities. They perform functions within a wider system delivering significant impact. Small grants can support new ideas and the adaptation of existing ideas, and can facilitate projects to mature into larger funding streams. However, it's not always straightforward; gaps in the system, application effort, and the challenge of sustainability can affect the impact of small grants and who can engage. How you fund is as important to consider as the levels of funding made available with proportionate burden, relationships with funded communities, and risk. Small grants can and do make a difference but how they are applied is key.  

Thank you to the session participants and our panel members:

• Chris Manion: British Science Association
• Imogen Thompson: Institute of Physics 
• Andy Thompson: Science and Facilities Technology Council
• Vicky Mason:  Discovery Planet  
• Charlotte Lester: Royal Society of Chemistry