Over the summer and during our 2-week break in September, we’ve been reviewing the services we provide at GRIN. We’ve found that, over the course of the last 18 months, and particularly since COVID-19 started having a significant impact on all of our lives in March 2020, we’ve received more requests for advice and support than we have capacity to deal with. In view of this, we’ll be focusing on the following provision for the immediate future:
o Commissioned work – unfortunately, we are not in a position to take on any further commissions at this time. However, we can direct agencies seeking paid support to a list of trusted agencies and consultants that provide similar services to GRIN.
o Pro bono support – similarly, we have very limited capacity to provide any pro bono advice and information, including funding prospect searches, and in fact have a long backlog of requests to work through. When capacity becomes available, we will prioritise requests from our bulletin and database subscribers. We will continue to respond to all requests for advice and information, although this may now mean signposting to other agencies that can offer support and guidance.
o Daily GRIN Grant Bulletins – we will continue to send out a daily grant bulletin every morning throughout the week, with the exception of public bank holidays and a 3-week break over the Christmas period. Each bulletin takes around 3 hours to research and prepare and we want to commit at least this amount of time each day to continuing and improving the daily bulletin. Organisations are always welcome to contact us with news about their organisation, events or job opportunities, which we’ll feature as soon as we can at no charge.
o GRIN Grants Database – the feedback we’ve received from subscribers is that the GRIN Grants Database has helped them secure often vital grant funding. We want to invest more time into making the database an even better resource by adding more features and information. Our commitment to improving the grants database is a key reason behind not taking on any additional commissioned work.
o Website and Facebook posts – we will continue to provide a daily news item on our website and post any grants-related information that followers may find interesting on our Facebook page. We have tried posting regular items on other social media platforms in the past, such as Twitter, but we simply don’t have the capacity to do this going forward.
GRIN is a small social enterprise consisting of just two people, one of which works full-time for another organisation. This means that our capacity is restricted to slightly over just one full-time post, hence our decision to narrow our focus to specific areas of our work, particularly the daily grants bulletin and monthly grants database updates, while reducing our commitment to commissions and pro bono support and advice.
We normally use our Christmas break to review GRIN services and set out our plans, aims and hopes for the year in a ‘News’ item when we open for business at the start of each January, and we plan to reappraise the above arrangements this December (so watch this space!).
Christmas is less than 100 days away!