Comic Relief - the maths
The cost of grantmaking
Today’s article…
…is a response to a recent LinkedIn debate about Comic Relief’s latest grant funding round for small charities.
You can view the original post here.
When Caroline started writing the post, it went in a direction she was not expecting. She was sort of forced to eat her words and in doing so (re) learned an important lesson.
We hope you find it fascinating.
Tony and Caroline
p.s. this piece is for paid subscribers.
If you want access to all of our content, past and future, you can upgrade your subscription today.
Comic Relief, the maths
by Caroline Danks
A couple of weeks ago, Comic Relief announced a new fund for small charities
Apparently, the system crashed almost as immediately as it opened and for those ‘lucky’ enough to access it, the form is incredibly especially complicated / long winded…
Yeah, one of those.
Grants up to £5,000 are available. They said that they expected to make 140 grants – this is a total of £700,000.
Now, I’m not a maths genius but a quick Google of ‘Red Nose Day 2024’ reveals that they raised over £40 million in one evening.
I had questions:
1. Where did all the money go?
2. Are they spending enough (whatever ‘enough’ means) on grants?
Fundraisers are sensitive to this topic at present.
The rapidly changing sector, well documented by fellow Substackers Jo Jeffery and Alex Evans has some of us (mostly small charities reliant on grants) battening down the hatches of collaboration and adopting full on scarcity-panic mode.
When operating from this mindset, it’s all too easy to go shouting at people on the internet before equipping yourself with the right information.
Aware of the trap I was about to fall into, I grabbed a calming cup of camomile and went to Comic Relief’s accounts for answers…