Heritage Lottery Fund: Transition Funding

Overview

You may be in transition legally or structurally – for example, local authority heritage services transferring to trust status - or facing strategic or financial challenges due to loss of regular or anticipated income streams.

To apply you must be a previous recipient of an HLF grant.

Under this programme, they fund applications from:

• Not-for-profit organisations
• Partnerships led by not-for-profit organisations.

Through Transition funding they support activities that:

• Are deined at the outset
• Have not yet started
• Will usually take no more than 18 months to complete (maximum two years);
• Will contribute to achieving the outcomes they describe.

Examples of activities that we can support include (but are not limited to):

Paying suitably qualiied professionals to support you and your organisation in activities such as:

• Analysing your current situation and identifying strategic options for future
• Considering and, if appropriate, implementing changes to your governance arrangements, for example updating your legal structure, setting up a trading arm, or exploring a merger with
• another organisation
• Exploring and creating new partnerships where this will strengthen your resilience or result in efficiencies
• Reviewing your current operations, business plan and cost base in order to identify more efficient ways of working and/or new sources of revenue
• Reviewing communications and marketing activities and identifying options for improvements to how you engage with existing and potential customers, volunteers, donors and supporters, partners and other stakeholders
• Identifying alternative sources of funding or ways to sustain your organisation
• Carrying out research into your customers’ or audiences’ needs to make your services more efective or to back-up the case for new products or services
• Identifying skills and capacity available to your organisation through staff, Trustees and volunteers and making plans to fill gaps
• Mentoring of key personnel through processes of change to embed new business models, approaches or skills
• Supporting engagement of people throughout the organisation with any of these processes including Trustees, management, staff and volunteers
• Preparing fresh strategic and business plans and implementing key stages
• Providing short-term revenue support to sustain existing activities or services while you carry out any of these reviews or processes
• Paying for short-term additional staff posts to free up existing personnel to lead the transition process and carry out any of the activities above
• Developing and piloting a new service ofer or ways of working.