Social Tech Trust Funding
Overview
They’ve identified three core areas where they believe tech has the greatest opportunity to transform lives:
- Communities – where everyone has the power to make change
- Health – to support all people to live healthy lives
- Wealth – for prosperity in our lives, our communities and the world
They collaborate with diverse partners working across these areas to identify and back the people and organisations who have the potential to deliver change.
Two Financial Pathways
- Grant Prpgrammes - Through their grant programmes they nurture early-stage transformative innovation, providing funding and working directly with ventures to support them to build and test their models.
- Investment - They recognise, that many of these ventures need further investment as they build their sustainability and grow their impact. Their investment approach focuses on identifying, investing and supporting the most promising ventures to scale their business.
They draw on our established networks to connect these scalable approaches with the customers, partners and advocates who can help drive the ventures, and ultimately the change they are working to deliver, to the next level.
Every step of the way, they create a vibrant community, bringing in partners from government, industry and charities to position the UK as a global leader in social tech.
Their Investment Approach
To further their vision, they recognise that it is imperative that the best social tech ventures have access to the capital they need to scale.
Their research has highlighted that the current gap in the availability of equity investment, particularly at the seed stage, is limiting many social tech ventures from reaching their full potential.
Building on a decade of funding early stage ventures at the pre-seed stage, we are now expanding our offer by establishing a dedicated fund to invest in the strongest ventures and support their growth. Their fund is supported by the UK government’s Department for Digital, Culture Media and Sport.
Their investment approach is aligned to their vision. They see that ventures who are focused on social transformation have the greatest potential for growth and impact at scale.
They focus on three core areas where they have identified the greatest opportunity for social transformation to be facilitated by tech; communities, health and wealth.
Read more about why sustainable social impact needs a more flexible approach to investment in their blog.
To find out more about the fund and their investment activities please contact them at hello@socialtechtrust.org.
To keep up to date with opportunities, please sign up to our newsletter and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Programmes
They run a number of programmes which offer support including financial support to organisations accepted onto the programme. Visit the link above to see invitations to apply to programmes.
Example programmes:
Grants
Each grant funding programme has specific criteria, so it’s important to check that your application aligns with the programme that you’re applying for.
Fundamentally, they look for:
- A social mission embedded in your governance
- Potential to deliver transformative social impact at scale through a deep understanding of the critical social challenge that drives your innovation and an ambition to make a difference
- An innovative approach to tackling a social challenge in the areas of communities, health and wealth
- A working product or service that you will continue to test and iterate
- Evidence of your potential to create user, social and financial value; for example, a theory of change; user co-design and testing; identified social KPIs; or prospective partnerships or routes to market
- An experienced and aligned team with the in-house tech capabilities
- Registration as a UK-based organisation and the potential for social impact in the UK
They’re currently closed for applications for grant funding, so please sign up to their newsletter and follow them on Twitter and LinkedIn, to be the first to hear about new opportunities.
For a list of previously funded projects visit the website here