How to apply for social investment

This guidance will help you decide whether your work could contribute to Esmée’s aims and priorities, and if it's worth investing time in 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 including where we see specific opportunities for social investment. Read the parts relevant to your work so you can consider whether your work could contribute to our strategy. If you have questions, check our social investment FAQ.

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

First, some details about your organisation including: charity or company number; total income for the last financial year; number of trustees and non-executive directors; your organisation’s leadership; and your contact details. We’ll also ask you about which Esmée aim and priorities your work fits.

Second, we want to know about your funding request. You will have the option of uploading an existing pitch deck or 1-to-2-page summary about your work. We will also ask you the following two questions to learn more what you’re aiming to achieve and how you will make it happen with Esmée funding. Your answers to both questions are meant to be short. Please aim for no more than 300 words for both questions.

You can choose to respond to the two questions either by writing your responses in the form or uploading an audio or video recording with your responses. See our social investment FAQ for guidance to uploading a recording.

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.

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 with the outcome of your EOI.

Feedback

If your application is unsuccessful, we will provide email feedback explaining why, and which we hope is helpful.

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 aims and priorities.
• 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.
• Repayment/Exit: How you plan to repay the investment.
• 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 and ability to repayability, 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 a more detailed due diligence process. For those we decide not to take forward, we will offer feedback, which we hope is helpful.

Social investment applications that we invite to go forward will then enter a process of due diligence. We will ask for more information about your organisation and proposal. This will help us make a decision about whether we can make an informed recommendation to our Trustees.

The due diligence process

• The process can vary across different proposals depending on many factors. We will look in detail at your impact plans, your organisation, and your financial model, in order to decide if, and how, we may be able to support you.
• There is no set form to complete but we will work with you to find out what information you already have and what else you may need to develop.
• In some cases, we can offer support to applicants that need extra help to develop their proposals through a referral to the Reach Fund. We will discuss this option with you.

As part of our standard process we will ask all applicants about:

• 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.

Supporting documents

We will also ask for the following documents, amongst others depending on the exact nature of your proposal:

• 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
• 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)
• A copy of your safeguarding policy (learn about our approach to safeguarding)

After discussing and reviewing all of the information, we may decide not to take a recommendation forward, in which case we will provide feedback. In some cases we may decide that we can’t support your proposal yet, but we may be able to return to it in the future.

Recommendations that are taken forward are given a final approval by our Trustees who 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:

• Social investment up to £500k - Executive/Trustee committee, which meets every 6 weeks. In some cases our Executive/Trustee Committee will ask the Board to review a proposal of under £500k if they identify a particular risk or complexity.
• Social investment over £500k - Trustee Board, which meets 6 times a year.

The amount of time this process takes varies according to many factors, but three months is a reasonable minimum expectation.

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

A legal contract will need to be signed before an approved investment can be drawn.

Applicants are expected to cover their own costs for legal review. In some cases this might use a standard loan template which can be reviewed and completed within a few weeks, but for more complex investment structures or ones involving multiple stakeholders, the process can take longer.

We will give feedback to every organisation who has gone through the due diligence process.