How to apply

Take our short quiz to find out if your work meets the minimum eligibility criteria for Esmée support.

Reading this guidance will help you decide whether it's worth investing time in submitting an application to us. In the contents menu, you'll find:

• Are we the right funder for you: covering what we will and won't support, including our exclusions, the type of funding we provide, and how we make decisions.
• Our strategy and priorities: covering our funding priorities and the long-term outcomes we're looking to support in each. Read the parts relevant to your work so you can consider whether your work could contribute to our long-term outcomes. If you have questions, check our FAQ.

When you are ready to tell us about your work, you can submit an Expression of Interest through our website. This is in two parts.

First, some details of your organisation including: charity or company number; total income for the last financial year; number of trustees and non-executive directors; and date established.

Second, we want to know more about what you’re aiming to achieve and how you will make it happen with Esmée funding by answering two questions. Your answers to both questions are meant to be short. You’ll have a total of 300 words to answer them.

The two questions are:

1. What would you like Esmée to support? Briefly outline how our funding and support will be used.
2. What’s the change you are focused on achieving and how is your organisation well placed to deliver it? We’re interested in understanding the need your work will address, and the opportunities your organisation or partnership is uniquely placed to take. We will also look at your website to learn about your organisation so use this space to focus on the change you want to achieve in relation to Esmée’s priorities/long-term outcomes.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

Once you’ve submitted your Expression of Interest, you will be redirected to a DEI monitoring form to complete about your organisation. We want to use the information we gather to help us identify and address structural inequity, and ensure that the reach of our funding and our funding practices are fair and just. Learn more about how we're classifying our data.

Response times

We will get back to you within:

• Four weeks for applications towards our funding priorities in A Fairer Future or Our Natural World
• Six weeks for applications towards our funding priorities in Creative, Confident Communities

Feedback

Because we receive many more requests than we can support, the Expression of Interest is intended to be quick. Unfortunately, this makes it difficult for us to give detailed feedback on applications at this stage. However, we share general feedback on why we turn down requests and what we consider when making decisions, which we hope is helpful.

Submitting your Expression of Interest

When you are ready, you can submit an Expression of Interest.

If we think that your work potentially matches our aims, we'll invite you for a call to learn more about your plans.

We will use this to:

• Get a sense of whether your organisation and its work could contribute to our priorities and long-term outcomes.
• Find out more about your organisation and its work.
• Consider whether we might be the right funder for you.

The conversation will cover:

• Fit to our strategy: Your work, the change you hope to achieve and how you plan to achieve it; how your work complements our plans - the outcomes we want to contribute to and the work of others we fund.
• Approach: Who you work with and your appetite for collaboration; your approach to learning and how you act on it; your ability to take advantage of opportunities.
• Track record: Your organisation, influence, and impact to date.

After the call, we’ll consider your work alongside other funding requests at our staff meeting where we'll look at fit to strategy as well as how well-placed the organisation is to deliver the work. We'll decide which are the strongest fit and what will be the most effective use of our resources, and invite those applicants to submit a proposal. For those we decide not to take forward, we will offer feedback, which we hope is helpful.

If we agree that your work is a good fit for our strategy, we’ll invite you to submit a proposal, which you'll have three months to do. If you have a business, project or strategic plan already in place that describes your work, which you can use to show how your work aligns with our strategy, please use this rather than write a new proposal.

We will use this to:

• Find out in more detail how your plans align with Esmée’s impact goals and priorities.
• Understand what the planned outcomes of your work are, and how Esmée could work with you to achieve them.
• Gather some important documents on your organisation.

The proposal should cover:

• Alignment with Esmée: What funding from Esmée will enable you to deliver, and how your current work or future plans align with our priorities.
• About you: A summary of your organisation - its origins, major milestones, experience of working strategically and influencing.
• Support: In a sentence, what you would like us to support. The amount of funding you are requesting from us and over what period. If you are requesting multi-year funding, we encourage you to account for inflation and increase your annual amount accordingly. Visit the Office for National Statistics for information on the current rate of inflation.
• The Work: What you plan to deliver with the funding; the approach you will take and how this will achieve your intended impact; who you collaborate with; what risks you have identified.

Additional questions:

• Outcomes: Tell us up to three outcomes you are planning to achieve, and what your indicators of progress might be. These should contribute to Esmée’s impact goals and priorities. See our guidance on outcomes for more information.
• Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI): Tell us about your approach to DEI within your organisation and through your work. We are interested in hearing about current challenges and any changes you are looking to make.
• Real Living Wage: As part of the information about your organisation, we will ask if you pay all staff the real Living Wage.

Why we ask about DEI: We think it's a key responsibility for us as a funder to influence more inclusive practice in the sectors and organisations we support. By learning about the progress of those we fund, we will be able to share good practice with others. We also want to support organisations that have further to go on DEI, which are keen to improve their practice.

Why we ask about the Living Wage: Esmée is a Living Wage Funder, which means that we encourage all organisations we fund to pay the UK Real Living Wage as a minimum.

Supplementary documents:

Along with your proposal we will also ask for the following documents:

• A copy of your latest approved annual report and accounts
• A set of management accounts covering the last financial year if you do not yet have an audited or independently examined version (if applicable)
• An income and expenditure budget for the organisation for the current financial year
• A copy of your safeguarding policy (learn about our approach to safeguarding)
• If you are applying for a project, a budget identifying what you would like us to fund and any other funding approached/secured
• A copy of your Constitution, Memorandum and Articles of Association or other rules (if you are not a registered charity)

If you do not have an existing business, project or strategic plan which covers this information, and are putting together a proposal just for us, it should be 4-6 pages for smaller requests (£60k or less), and 8-12 pages for larger ones. You will have three months to submit. When we receive the proposal, we’ll set up a follow-up conversation to discuss it.

When we receive your proposal, we will start our potential relationship with a call to:

• Explain our new strategy. We will explore how we could use our additional tools to support your work, and how the proposal might fit with our future portfolio.
• Build the relationship. It’s important to us to build bridges and networks with all organisations working towards our goals, whether or not we decide to fund them.
• Build our understanding. The more we listen and learn from you, the better our assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the proposal, and how we could best work together, will be.
• Understand the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion in our work more widely.

The conversation will cover:

• Mission and vision: What is your understanding of the broader context of your work and the communities it serves? We are looking for our funding to make a significant impact – does your ambition match up?
• How you work: What is your methodology? Is it new or established? Sometimes we are looking for pioneering approaches, lateral thinking that opens up new ground – is there evidence of that? What is significant, important, or different about this proposal?
• What could go wrong: Is the work new and untested? What other risks are there? How does the potential impact balance the risk?
• Voice: To what extent is the proposal grounded or designed in collaboration with those it is supporting?
• Collaboration: To what extent do you collaborate and who or what else needs to be funded for your work to be successful?  How do we see them interacting with our extended tools and new approach?
• Diversity, equity and inclusion:  What is your approach to DEI?
• Governance and finance: How robust is your organisation, and how strong is your governance?

Our Trustees work with our executive team to make decisions on how to use our resources and make funding decisions.

Decisions are made depending on the size of the funding request:

• Grants up to £90k - Executive Team
• Grants up to £250k & social investment up to £500k - Executive/Trustee committee, which meets every 6 weeks
• Grants over £250k and Social Investment over £500k - Trustee Board, which meets 6 times a year

We aim to give you a decision within three months of receiving your proposal. However, there may be a few occasions where larger requests take longer due to the timing of our Board meetings. Decisions are usually faster for smaller grants (£90,000 or less).

See our FAQs and why we turn things down for more on how we make decisions.

We will give feedback to every organisation we ask to submit a full proposal.

Unfortunately, we cannot give detailed feedback on expressions of interest. Because we receive many more requests than we can support, the Expression of Interest is intended to be quick. This makes it difficult for us to give detailed feedback on applications at this stage. We are also using our team’s assessments to amend our guidance, answer frequently asked questions, and give more general application advice on our website.