What the Emergency Funding Response Changed for Good

In spring 2020 a great many funders did something they had spent years being told was impossible. They cut the application form to a fraction of its length, released restrictions on existing grants, and paid out on trust because there was no time to do anything else.

The interesting part is what happened next. The obvious prediction was that the old forms would come back once the emergency passed. For a meaningful share of funders, they did not.

What actually stuck?

The clearest evidence is the Open and Trusting Grant-making community, run by the Institute for Voluntary Action Research. The first grantmakers signed its eight commitments on 10 February 2021, in the middle of the crisis. Source: IVAR, ivar.org.uk.

It did not wind down with the pandemic. By March 2025 more than 150 funders had signed up, between them making grants worth over £1 billion in 2023-24. Source: UKGrantmaking, ukgrantmaking.org. IVAR has since surveyed over 1,200 charities on what difference the approach makes, and has extended the work to public agencies, developing guidance with 30 of them alongside London Funders, Yorkshire Funders and the Scotland Funders’ Forum. Source: IVAR, ivar.org.uk.

That last point matters if you work in a council or another public body. This is no longer only a foundations conversation.

The three changes worth keeping

Asking only what you will use

One of the eight commitments asks funders to test their application forms for clarity and relevance, avoid repetition, and stop collecting information they do not actually use. The emergency proved the point by force: when funders had to cut their forms to the bone, the decisions they made were not noticeably worse.

The question to ask about any field on your form is what decision it changes. If the honest answer is none, it is costing an applicant twenty minutes for nothing.

Unrestricted and flexible funding

Project restrictions exist to give funders confidence about where money goes. In practice they often push organisations into presenting core costs as project costs, which produces a tidier budget and a less honest one. Funders who moved to unrestricted grants during the emergency generally found the sector did not misuse the freedom.

Reporting proportionate to the grant

Long reports on small grants are the most common complaint charities make about funders, and the least defensible. Nobody reads a fifteen-page report on a £3,000 grant, which makes the requirement pure cost with no corresponding benefit.

Why do funders slip back?

Usually not because anyone decided to. Forms grow by accretion. A board asks a question after an awkward case, a new programme lead adds a section, a compliance review bolts on three fields, and nobody ever removes anything. Five years later the form is back where it started and no single person made that choice.

The defence is a scheduled review with a named owner. Once a year, go through the form field by field and require a reason for each one to stay. Anything that cannot be justified comes out. The same applies to reporting templates.

It also helps to know who your form is quietly excluding. We looked at that in detail for one group of applicants in the barriers social work organisations face when applying for grants.

How does submission software support lighter-touch funding?

The usual objection to a shorter form is that the funder still needs certain information from certain applicants. Conditional logic resolves that: a question appears only for the applicants it applies to, so the form stays short for everyone else rather than being padded to cover every case.

Beyond the form, a submission platform lets you scale reporting to the size of the grant, chase outstanding returns automatically instead of by hand, and pull figures for your board without rebuilding a spreadsheet each quarter. Lighter touch for applicants does not have to mean less oversight for you. It usually means moving the oversight from the application stage, where it burdens everyone, to the monitoring stage, where it is proportionate.

If you are reviewing how your programme runs, grant management software is worth looking at alongside the form itself.

Frequently asked questions

What is Open and Trusting Grant-making?

Open and Trusting Grant-making is a set of eight commitments developed by the Institute for Voluntary Action Research with UK funders and charities. The first grantmakers signed up on 10 February 2021. The commitments cover being clear about priorities and exclusions, asking only relevant questions, and reducing the reporting burden on funded organisations.

How many funders have adopted these commitments?

More than 150 funders had signed up by March 2025, between them making grants worth over £1 billion in 2023-24. The approach has also been extended to public agencies, with guidance developed alongside 30 of them.

Does unrestricted funding mean giving up oversight?

No. Unrestricted funding changes what the grant can be spent on, not whether the funder monitors it. Most funders who moved to unrestricted grants kept monitoring in place and reduced the burden at the application stage instead, where it falls on every applicant rather than only on those who are funded.

How do I shorten an application form without losing information I need?

Go through the form field by field and ask what decision each answer changes. Remove anything that changes none. Where a question is only relevant to some applicants, use conditional logic so it appears for them and not for everyone else, which keeps the form short without losing the detail.