Why do charities have to answer the same questions twenty different ways? Ten Yorkshire funders decided to stop asking – and built a shared application form instead, followed by a common report form.
Carla Marshall, trust manager at the Sir George Martin Trust, talks us through how they agreed what to ask, what to leave out, and why the form isn’t as short as you’d think.
Q: How did the idea for the common application form come about?
Carla: It was at an IVAR event about better reporting, back in 2019. In a breakout session I was talking to some fellow Yorkshire funders, and we jokingly said, wouldn’t it be amazing if we could come up with a common application form? We laughed about it then – it seemed pretty unrealistic.
Then COVID hit, and everything changed. Times were even harder for frontline charities, who were all so pressed for time. A group of us got together online and thought, actually, let’s really make this happen.
I put a call out to our Yorkshire Funders members: we’ve got this idea of a common application form, we don’t know what it really means, but does anyone want to be part of a task force? Luckily, within a week I got 10 responses – a couple of councils, a couple of community foundations, a couple of larger funders, and a couple of smaller trusts like ourselves. So we were good to go.
The whole point was to save grant seekers time and energy. Charities always say, “why do I have to fill in 20 different forms just to get 30 grand in small grants?” If funders use the same form, applicants can cut and paste what they did for one, tweak it, and job done.
Q: What process did you go through to develop the form?
Carla: We started by collating our 10 forms for small grants, and listed every question in a simple Excel sheet, then highlighted the most popular ones. At each meeting we’d say, well, actually we don’t all need that one – we’re going to be tough, let’s take it out. We ended up with essential questions everyone should use, plus three or four optional ones.
At first we thought, could we have a portal created? But when we talked to some of our frontline charities, they said what they actually love about working with funders is when you get a good relationship going. They didn’t want one portal where you apply once and lots of funders might pick you – they said the relationship is so vital.
Q: How did 10 funders with different priorities make a joint decision?
Carla: We had to make compromises. For example, there was one question I had a bit of a bugbear about: how does the project meet the strategic objectives of our fund? I said, look, if I were applying, I’d just go on the funder’s website, copy what they said they’re looking for, and paste it in – that’s a waste of time. But some funders with public money, or community foundations, needed that response in their form to satisfy their donors. So we made it optional. Safeguarding went in as optional too, though I’ve personally since moved it to one of the first questions in our own form – and we kept environmental impact as optional, since not every small charity has the capacity for a strategy on that.
We brought in funding advisors from local infrastructure organisations, and three of us piloted it over several months. The response was immediately positive – people said, oh, I really love this.
Q: Does it resemble other application forms, or is there anything unique about it?
Carla: It came from 10 funders’ forms, so it looks like everyone’s form. That was the whole point – it’s not meant to look “oh wow, that’s radical”.
It’s not the shortest, either, and that’s a key learning: people think being a kind, open and trusting funder means making forms as short as possible, but being short isn’t necessarily good – it often means people can’t tell their story. Applicants want to tell their story. So we made sure we were asking the right questions to get both the qualitative and quantitative picture.
it looks like everyone’s form. That was the whole point”
Q: The form is designed for grants up to around £5,000 – does that limit its ambition?
Carla: In our original task force, community foundations and councils who might also give out £100,000 thought about it differently to a trust like mine, where £5,000 is usually the most we give, occasionally up to £10,000.
Personally, I think the form works well up to £50,000 too, as long as you’re having a conversation with people alongside it to dig into more depth. Wood Smith Foundation, one of the first adopters, give out smaller and larger grants, and use the common form as a first stage, then do an in-person interview for the second stage on larger grants. It was just meant to give people a guide, not something that has to stretch to a big capital project – for us, it’s a good starting point whatever the size of the grant.
Q: You didn’t stop there – how was the common report form developed and what does it look like?
Carla: We had a session with Ben from IVAR in 2024, by which point our task force had become the Aligned Working Network for Yorkshire Funders. We floated the idea of a common report form and honestly, people weren’t sure it would work, so we left it. But the idea kept coming back, and in 2025 we set up a Common Report Form Task Force.
This time the group was five rather than 10. A smaller task-and-finish group kept it moving – it took six months, compared to a year for the application form. We had a focus group with four frontline charities in October 2025, and interestingly, the main feedback was that it was too short – so we ended up adding more to it afterwards.
One of our task force members – ASDA Foundation – had a digital grant management system that we loved, with a digital version of their end-of-report form. We decided that was really key. We didn’t want an old-fashioned Word document where people felt they had to write pages and pages. So our common report form is a mixture of simple, quick tick boxes, and then some open questions where people can tell their story.
Q: What take-up have you had, and is it just for Yorkshire funders?
Carla: The biggest challenge has been getting people to adopt it. The application form has been going for nearly four years, and I’d expected 30 or 40 funders by now – we’ve got 13. What we’ve learned is the need for flexibility: early on we said you couldn’t change the form, or it wouldn’t be “common.” Now our guidance notes say clearly that some of you will need to change this, please use it as a template – even similar, rather than identical, forms are better than nothing.
We’ve dropped “Yorkshire” from the name, because we’ve had interest from around the country – there’s at least one funder in London using it now. If anyone else is using it, we just ask that they email us, so we can keep track of who’s adopted it.
Q: In an ideal world where all funders were using some version of both forms, how do you think that would change the experience for charities?
Carla: I was at a charity in Wakefield on Monday, and Bradford last week, and they all say the same thing – why do funders need to ask different questions when we all basically want to know the same things? Especially for small grants.
why do funders need to ask different questions when we all basically want to know the same things?”
The five most common words used to describe applying for funding in the recent IVAR Searching for Life Rafts frontline charity survey were: challenging, frustrating, exhausting, time-consuming and stressful.
We hope that the common forms can become a life raft and if more funders use them (or something similar), each application and report could take closer to an hour to complete rather than a whole day, which gives charities more time to spend supporting people and running their charity well.
Q: What’s your advice for funders who are nervous about adopting something designed by someone else, or changing what they’ve already got?
Carla: Look at who’s been involved in the task forces – ASDA, Joseph Rowntree – these aren’t tiny trusts, they’re quality, respected funders. We’re all stretched, so why try to come up with something new if you’re not regularly talking to your applicants and grant holders anyway? Use the common forms – they’re years in the making, and we’re constantly reviewing them.
And if anyone in another region wants to do the same thing: Yorkshire Funders is over 30 years in the making, and we all know each other really well, so a lot of this works because we trust each other. My advice to other regions would be – come and look at the common forms page on Yorkshire Funders as a starting point, and let us know if you like it.
The Sir George Martin Trust is part of Open and Trusting — a community of funders who put trust, respect and flexibility at the heart of grant-making.
Using the Common Application form reflects several of the Open and Trusting commitments, living up to principles like asking relevant questions through carefully agreed-upon, streamlined forms, don’t waste time by cutting down redundant administrative tasks for charities, and being proportionate by keeping application and reporting requirements aligned with the size of the grant.
Video Q&A – Open & Trusting and Us
IVAR also sat down with Carla to answer snap questions on how The George Martin Trust approaches grant-making, how being part of the O&T community has been beneficial, and the hope she draws from working with charities.