Guide to Successful Small-Project Funding

Obtaining funding is possibly the single most difficult task involved in running with any community arts project — it’s bureaucratic, laborious and, not least, time-consuming. In this guide, Pauline Hadaway, project director with Belfast Exposed, lays out in one succinct document everything you could possibly need to know about funding - tips and warnings to guide you from start to finish. Keep it and refer to it when tackling funding applications — it could well become your bible to successful small-project funding…

Three Golden Rules!

Approach with extreme caution! Putting together a funding application can be time consuming and, if you’re not careful can steer your project off course. You can get tied up meeting someone else’s targets and may find your original aims and objectives have been compromised.

Don’t be led by funding criteria. Your ideas and your project should always come first.

If you are new to funding applications, go for fairly small sums from two or three funding bodies and investigate independent trusts and foundations, especially business sponsored funds (for example, Lloyds TSB, Nationwide and Tesco all fund arts projects in Northern Ireland).

What is arts project funding?

Local authority arts and community services departments

• The Gulbenkian Foundation
• Lloyds TSB Foundation
• The Arts Council.

There are a large number of bodies which exist to finance groups and, to a lesser extent, individuals, developing arts or cultural projects which are deemed to support the public good. I’ll deal with the problem of identifying potential funders separately, but if your project raises issues or provides services which are of public interest or for the public good, then somebody, somewhere will probably be willing to support you. Obviously some projects are more attractive to funders than others. These are projects, which explore issues around the environment, health, poverty and social exclusion, minorities, education, safety, local community issues, children & young people etc. The information in this article relates solely to project funding, i.e. activities and outcomes that are time-limited and self-contained. (Revenue funding supports programmes of activities which are ongoing, often requiring salaries and higher capital spend, rent and equipment for example. At the early stages of an idea, revenue funding is probably out of the question.)

The following is a step-by-step guide to putting together a successful funding application for a small project (budgets between £500 and £5,000).

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