The funding gap, explained

If running your organisation feels harder than the actual work, you're not imagining it. The problem isn't you. It's the way the funding system is built.

The admin tax

Here's how we see it. A typical grant application takes around 40 hours to complete. At a conservative £25 an hour, that's roughly £1,000 of time per application. With success rates sitting near 30%, you can burn close to £3,000 in effort for every grant you actually win.

We call this the 16% compliance tax: for every £1 your community raises, around 16p disappears into admin before it reaches a single person. That's not incompetence on your part. In our view, it's baked into the design.

Infrastructure-blocked, not idea-blocked

Most organisations that struggle don't have bad ideas. They have good models, real traction, often a waiting list. What they don't have is the infrastructure to keep going while they deliver.

That's the gap. You can prove your model works and still get treated like a risky startup, because the system doesn't have a box for an 18-month-old organisation already delivering at scale.

Why hubs close after two years

There's a pattern we see again and again. Funders will happily back a shiny new programme but won't fund the back office that keeps the organisation alive to deliver it. In the UK social sector, the imbalance between spending on delivery and innovation versus spending on resilience runs at something like 75 to 1.

So a community hub wins a project grant, delivers brilliantly, then folds because nobody funded the skeleton holding it up.

What we do about it

InclusiFund exists to close that gap. We build the tools that cut the admin tax, and we help organisations frame their funding around resilience, not just impact. The free CIC Toolkit is the starting point: tools.inclusifund.co.uk.

You shouldn't have to become a professional fundraiser to do the work you signed up for. We're trying to make sure you don't.

— Reece Dunn