The view from… London Funders

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With a renewed focus on the role of philanthropy, London Funders, a UKGrantmaking partner, reflect on why understanding the grantmaking picture can help us act with greater purpose and be a catalyst for collaboration, both in London and beyond

The publication of this year’s UKGrantmaking comes at a time when we know many charities and community organisations continue to face significant challenges. Rising costs, increasing demand for services, and ongoing financial uncertainty are putting pressure on organisations across the country. Against this backdrop, UKGrantmaking provides an important reminder that grant funding remains a vital source of investment in communities and social change.

The findings this year show that, overall, grant funding continues to grow, with this year’s total representing an increase of 4%, slightly above inflation. But we know it’s a nuanced picture. The data reflects a diverse funding sector, with some funders increasing their giving, others reducing it, and many maintaining existing levels of support. What UKGrantmaking offers is not a single narrative, but a clearer understanding of how grant funding is evolving. London Funders has been a partner on this project for the past three years, as we’re interested in what the picture looks like in the capital, but also in understanding how this interacts with funding across other parts of the UK.

This evidence is increasingly important as interest grows in the role of philanthropy and other forms of impact driven investment in addressing complex societal challenges, and how different forms of capital can work together to create change. Within this wider funding ecosystem, grant funding plays a distinctive role. It can provide flexible, patient and mission-driven investment, enabling organisations and communities to respond to immediate needs, test new approaches and build long-term resilience.

For London Funders members, understanding these relationships has always been important. For two weeks in June, we came together for our Festival of Learning to explore how we can build a stronger funding ecosystem for the future. The scale and complexity of the challenges facing communities today require funders to work differently, and we’re increasingly looking to new forms of collaboration, more equitable practice and different models of investment to help us do this. Yet too often these efforts remain disconnected, making it difficult to see the bigger picture or act with collective purpose.

At this year’s Festival, we explored how we can make the funding ecosystem less fragmented and more responsive to need. One of the key themes that emerged was the role that data and intelligence play in achieving this – enabling us to better understand the scale and types of funding, the shape it takes, and its distribution across places and issues. We are looking to data, alongside other insights, for evidence that can inform strategic decisions and act as a catalyst for greater collaboration.

This is where UKGrantmaking makes an important contribution. By bringing together data from across the funding sector, it helps funders, policymakers and civil society organisations understand funding trends over time, identify emerging patterns and locate grantmaking within the wider context of the impact economy. This is particularly timely with the focus on new ways to unlock philanthropic giving and strengthen local communities. Effective collaboration through things like government match-funding initiatives, and the ambitions of the recent DCMS strategy ‘A Place to Give’ can be strengthened when we have a shared understanding of where resources are already being invested, where opportunities exist for greater coordination, and how different forms of funding can complement one another.

In London, we’ve also been putting this into practice through many of our networks, where we can draw on data used for UKGrantmaking to understand funding patterns and where analysis often acts as a springboard for action.  This includes everything from our local funder networks, some of our sector specific mapping projects, or where we’ve drawn on data to build the case for growing place-based giving as a vital infrastructure to ensure grantmaking reaches neighbourhood and community-level organisations.

UKGrantmaking is only able to go beyond the headline figures and dive into the detail of where grants go because funders choose to share their grants data, creating a collective resource that benefits the entire sector. The more data we have available, the better our understanding of funding patterns becomes. These insights are often the catalyst for new collaborations and funding programmes. We’re really pleased that, at the last count, half of our London Funders network already publish data through the 360Giving platform, and now that we are both part of Funders Together, we hope we’ll be able to use our collective resources and connections to support even more of those in our networks to start their open data journey.