Managing your emergency COVID-19 funding in England - including Coronavirus Community Support Fund grants

Once you’ve been awarded emergency COVID-19 funding in England - including a grant from the Coronavirus Community Support Fund (CCSF) - here’s what to expect. There are a few things you need to do as well.

We might contact you to ask how your project is going. You should also get in touch with us to let us know about changes to your project. For example, you’ll need to let us know if your organisation is changing its name or legal form.

You might need to show us how the funding was spent and you’ll need to be able to confirm this, through receipts, invoices or payroll documents. This is to confirm the funding was spent like you told us. You’ll need to track your spending against your budget to show any changes you make. This will help to show you are using the money to achieve what you were funded to do.

You only need to send us this evidence if we ask for it, but you should do it to manage your budget effectively. Another organisation we're working with might ask for this information. And you might be asked for it at any time during your project.

This process is called ‘post-grant assurance checks’.

Anytime you want to withdraw our funding as cash, it must be agreed by two people running the project. You also cannot withdraw more than £100 at a time. Remember to keep receipts for anything you buy in cash.

When the six months of funding has ended, we’ll ask organisations with grants over £10,000 to tell us what their final spend was, compared to their budget. This is so we can find out if you:

• still have some funding left
• have spent more than you planned to
• have spent the exact amount of funding we awarded you.

You’ll need to send this information to your funding officer by email four weeks after your funding ends. For example, if you got your first payment on 1 May, your funding will end on 31 October, and four weeks after this date, you’ll have to send us the information.

You’ll need to tell us:

• what you planned to spend the funding on (use the same cost headings you gave us in your original applications, so we can see where you have spent less than or more than you intended. The headings will be things like ‘salaries’ and ‘project activity’, and do not need to be more detailed than that)
• what you spent the funding on
• any overspend or underspend
• the total amount you spent.

You might also need to explain how you reached your budget figures. So we suggest keeping all your calculations.

You can use your own table. Or you can download one of our templates to use, depending on where your grant funding was from and which format suits you:

• Government allocation of funding - Excel (35KB)
• Government allocation of funding - PDF (58KB)
• The National Lottery COVID-19 funding - Excel (29KB)
• The National Lottery COVID-19 funding - PDF (58KB).

If you do not know who you were funded by, you can check your emails from us about your award.

If there’s a big difference between the amount of funding you got and how much of it you spent, tell us the reasons for this and any impact it might have had on the project.

You can send all this information by email to your funding officer.

Let people know about your grant and the amazing work you're doing in your community. Sharing the news about your project with your community can be a great way to keep them involved and engaged. If your funding comes from the Government, here’s some information about how to publicise your grant. If your funding comes from us, you can find out more about how to promote your grant.

Ipsos MORI will send you a survey

Ipsos MORI are the independent evaluator for this funding. About six months after you've started your grant, they'll email you a survey asking how you’ve used the funding. If you work with volunteers, you'll also need to forward on a separate survey to any volunteers, so we can find out about their experiences too.

If you have any questions about the grant survey, email:
CCSF-endofgrantsurvey@ipsos-mori.com.

If you have any questions about the volunteer survey, email: CCSF-volunteers-survey@ipsos-mori.com.

You’ll need to gather some information during the funding

We asked you to do this in the terms and conditions you agreed to. This will help you to answer the survey. Don't worry if you do not have all this information, or if some of it is not relevant. You can still complete the survey.

The survey contains questions on the following topics:

• why you applied for the emergency funding and how you used it
• how many people benefitted from the project or took part in an activity your organisation ran using the funding (we call these people 'beneficiaries')
  
• the number of new beneficiaries and the types of beneficiaries the funding helped to support
• the impact the funding had on beneficiaries
• how many volunteers were involved and the number of new volunteers
• the number of staff you put on furlough during the pandemic
• the number of staff who came back to work from furlough, or were not put on furlough, because of the funding
• the percentage of your leadership (for example, senior management team, board or committee) that are women, disabled, from a Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic (BAME) community, or from the LGBTQ+ community
• how much other funding you have received during the pandemic.

What we mean by volunteers

We mean people that gave unpaid time to your organisation while you had the emergency funding. This includes anyone who gave unpaid time as part of your organisation's work to benefit people and communities. It also includes formal volunteering, as well as informal community participation or social action, such as people working in their community or being a good neighbour.

Ipsos MORI will also carry out 300 interviews

The interviews will be with some organisations that were awarded Government funding and will take place after their funding has ended. We'll include a representative mix of the types of projects and organisations funded.

The interviews will be voluntary. They'll explore similar topics to the survey but in more detail.

We'll invite organisations who have applied or received funding to fill out a survey, to tell us about:

• your experience of The National Lottery Community Fund
• how you heard about the funding
• how much COVID-19 has affected your organisation.

We want to help share learning between organisations awarded emergency COVID-19 funding in England, including those funded by the Government's CCSF and us.

Ipsos MORI will invite you by email to join a Learning Hub from 19 October 2020. They’ll send the invitation to the main and senior contacts of your grant. It'll just be for grant holders to share, connect and learn.

The Learning Hub will have blogs, podcasts and other materials, with themes and content led by what matters most to you. There will also be regular activities that organisations can take part in.

Some overall insights and learning will also be shared with the wider voluntary and community sector, so that we can support organisations to navigate through the current crisis more effectively.

Funding awarded from 1 January 2021 is subject to subsidy control.