The Prudence Trust - What's Working 2025: Strength in Data

Overview

Strength in Data

In 2025 the Prudence Trust is delighted to offer another funding opportunity for charities to bolster their ability to gather and make use of data from their work. 

They believe well-evidenced practice is vital to advancing young people’s mental health and they believe this sector can have even more impact when they have the skills and tools to make the most of what they know.

They know that youth mental health charities are doing amazing work, and have access to a wealth of information to help themselves and fellow charities improve and grow services. They know they are passionate about offering the best possible support, but don’t always have the capacity or essential infrastructure needed to harness that information. They want to help.

Where their 2024 ‘What’s Working for Young People’s Mental Health?’ opportunity supported discrete pieces of evaluation work, this opportunity is about increasing organisations’ capacity to do good monitoring and analysis that could make evaluation work more valuable.

This opportunity is open in the first stage to those who meet all the criteria.  Grants will be awarded in June 2025.

Eligibility

This opportunity is for organisations who support young people who need support with their mental health. They will only consider applications from organisations who meet these four criteria:

• Organisation: UK registered charities or CICs with an annual income of £250,000 or over, and two years of published accounts.
• Beneficiaries: The charity or CIC must work exclusively with young people aged 10-30 (but need not cover the entire age range).
• Services delivered: The charity or CIC must deliver direct mental health support. For this opportunity we will only consider talk therapy or activities socially prescribed for young people experiencing anxiety or depression, as mental health support.
• Data collection: The charity or CIC already routinely collects data on mental health or wellbeing, and can demonstrate this.

They will not consider applications from unregistered charities, those running for less than two years, those whose work is not exclusively with young people (though they will consider those also supporting parents), those who are not delivering direct mental health support, or who are not already collecting mental health data from their work.

Eligible Costs

This funding opportunity recognises what the sector has told them it needs now – support harnessing their data. These grants should help organisations bolster their capacity to do quality data collection and to make use of that data to periodically review services. Their wish is that organisations are consistently strong in their ongoing monitoring and evaluation practice and less reliant on temporary external support.

What they will offer funding for

They rely on you, the experts, to tell them what you need to build this capacity. Some examples of what their funding could cover include:

• Upskilling of staff responsible for monitoring and evaluation
• Salaries for dedicated data or M&E roles
• Software or hardware needed to improve data infrastructure, e.g. databases
• Costs to work with an external evaluator or academic on specific programmes.
• External data management expertise, evaluation expertise

BUDGET AND GRANT AMOUNTS

Their total grants budget for this opportunity is £1m. They expect to award 5-6 grants, of various sizes, from this total. You should request an appropriate grant for the work you want to do. Those invited to second stage will be expected to carry out a review of their data needs and make a case for what they would like the grant to support.

•  They are less likely to consider requests over £300k. If you have a strong proposal for more than this, please contact them before applying.
• They won’t consider requests for less than £10,000. Other funders may be more suitable for these requests.