Staff, Skills and Operationalisation — Putting Participatory Grant Making (PGM) into Practice

If we agree that PGM approaches align with our values and provides a solution to some of the challenges we face as funders, we need to find ways to explore how to operationalise this — do we have the right staff team, skill set, process, resources and budgets?

The People Involved and Skills Needed

The prospect of not having the right people or skills set within a foundation to deliver PGM can be a scary prospect for the sector. Using PGM methods can feel like a threat to our professional expertise. What are funders here for if they aren’t here to make decisions about funding or strategy? Is our role null and void? This self preservation is an obvious and fair enough reaction — we want to cling on to our jobs. However in doing so we are avoiding some more important questions we should be asking ourselves — am I best placed and most informed to make that call? I know for me the answer to this question, if I am honest, is probably not. There are definitely more insightful, knowledgeable and informed people to make funding decisions; they just aren’t in the room.

The question (and your role) then changes to ‘how do I get them in the room’ or, even better, ‘how do I move the room to them’?

There are a range of different answers to this. You and your organisation can start to look at your recruitment and retention of staff and boards. Who is on your staff and boards? What knowledge and experience do they have? What knowledge and experience are you missing? How can you bring this into your organisation? How can you upskill your current staff members? There’s a range of organisations and initiatives that can help to diversify who you have in your teams if this is something you want to explore, like 2027 and Inclusive Boards.

You can also explore participatory approaches that allow people with the knowledge, skills and insights into the room — this is when your role then changes. We can start to develop, change and adapt what it means to be a funder. This might mean changing an organisation’s approach and a change in your role with an exciting opportunity to develop a different set of skills. For PGM the quality of relationships you have with communities and people in them will shape the impact we can make. You move from assessing written applications behind a desk to a navigator — supporting people to understand your processes and systems. You become a facilitator, a pro in conflict resolution, as you support groups of people to navigate difficult discussions and decisions. You become an events manager. You become the connector and horizon scanner — linking up ideas and people to share knowledge, processes and insights. You become the relationship builder and mentor as you support and guide people through the funding process.

You need to be realistic about how many staff you will need and at what point. In order to do this you will need to understand what funding model you are using and the logistics required to deliver it. How will applications be received, monitored and tracked? When and how will shortlisting and decision making take place?

You might only need one or two staff to design and implement a programme or funding round but then if you end up with 500 applications you might need to call in the cavalry to support your shortlisting process. It might only take one staff member to set up a community vote event but you might want much more support on the day. Who will be doing due diligence on the applicants or recommended projects?

At each step of the process you need to ask yourself — ‘how long will this take?’ ‘How long have we got?’ Which will help you answer — ‘how much staff time does this need?’ Understanding what aspects are able to shift, e.g. timescales, and what aren’t allows you to realistically model for what can actually be achieved.

So if you only have two staff members and you know it takes an hour to shortlist an application and there are 50 applications this is 25 hours per person — just under 4 days each of constant shortlisting. You also know that this isn’t your only workload and you need lunch, breaks etc so in reality you are likely to be doing this over a three week period — this is the timeframe you need to build into the process. Alternatively, if you know you have only a week to shortlist you would know that with 50 applications each taking an hour you will need to be supported by approximately 7 people working (pretty much flat out) on shortlisting.

What is it that you are able to flex and what is static?

Budgets

As you start to look at the budget for this work you need to think about both grant budget and operational budget.

What’s your overall grant budget, how many grants are you wanting to give out, and what size should these grants be? (Is it you deciding this or communities?) It might be that the driver and model of PGM for this work might also impact these questions. What are you trying to achieve or learn — can you do this with the grants sizes or number you are proposing?

When designing the Leaders with Lived Experience programme at The National Lottery Community Fund we asked lived experience leaders if we had £200k as the total grant budget, what should the grant sizes be and they said £10k each because they wanted as many organisations as possible to be able to access funding. When we probed deeper and asked them to ignore the overall grant budget what the most impactful grant size would be they said £50k as this would provide enough for both staff costs and project delivery over a year. We were lucky enough to be able to go for £50k grants to 20 organisations providing them with the funding they need to deliver, us enough of a cohort to be able to learn from, and for them to learn from each other.

The operational budget will obviously differ depending on the model of PGM you are using as well as other key considerations such as:

• Are you paying community members to give up their time to be involved? Is this a payment, an honorarium, a stipend? How much should/could this be? Will this be in cash or vouchers? Will a payment knock someone off their benefits? Which bits of the process are you paying them for?
• Are you paying for/providing childcare? For how many? For how long?
• What are the costs to provide access requirements e.g. interpreters, microphones, personal assistance etc?
• Are you providing food and drink? For how many?
• Are you paying for transport and accommodation?
• Do you require an external facilitator? — this can often help bridge the gap between funders and communities and provide expert skills if required
• Are you providing wrap around support to your decision makers e.g. pre-meetings, debriefs, training, conference attendance?
• Are you co-designing the project? What will this require? Workshops? Interviews? Surveys?
• What other materials will you need? Stationary, printing, projector, games or thank you cards?

Grant management, learning and support

Don’t forget about grant management. How are you going to do this for the project? Will this be standard for your organisation or will you be doing something different? Have the grant holders asked for something more or does your risk analysis require more? How many people will be required to support the grant holders? Is this something you are doing through your staff or through an external learning partner?

As I’ve touched upon elsewhere in this report, measuring impact is important but it’s also difficult. How do we measure the achievements of PGM and the grants we make through these processes? How do we learn from the things that have gone well and not so well? Again, if we think about why we are doing PGM and what the drivers are for this work we can use PGM as an interesting opportunity to do something exciting with grant management, learning and support. If you’ve gone through such a different approach to get the grants out to the communities, why fall into the same ways of reporting and monitoring. Ask yourself why am I doing it this way? What am I trying to achieve? Is this the most effective approach to achieve it? Who is going to do it? How are they going to do it? How much time will this take?

Spending time answering these questions as early in the process as possible will enable you to deliver an impactful and effective PGM approach, be realistic in your resource management and reduce the risk of you and your staff team burning out.