Most of our grants are paid annually in advance once the grant has been accepted and any conditions met. Subsequent payments of multi-year grants are usually paid after receipt of a suitable report, or an informal check-in regarding progress. We can be flexible regarding the timing of payments – feel free to speak to us if you’d like to change the schedule we set out in our grant offer.

Payments will either come directly from William Grant & Sons or via our account with CAF (Charities Aid Foundation). We will notify you when they have been made.

We see each of our grants as a learning opportunity, so don’t feel you need to wait until an end-of-year report to share insights or news. When we make your grant offer, we will tell you why we chose to make the grant and what it is about your organisation and its work that most interests us, so feel free to update your main contact at the Foundation at any time if you think there are things we’d be interested to know about.

We’re happy to be invited to relevant events but we don’t have the capacity to get to everything we’d like to. We can share invitations with members of our giving groups but please note they are rarely able to attend in person.

Once a year – or at the end of a grant – we’d like to find out more about what you’ve been doing and learning.

This helps us to:

• understand your organisation and your work better, including your successes and challenges, but also what you’re learning and thinking about for the future;
• where appropriate, consider if we can provide additional support in areas where you may be facing challenges or seeking to develop and advance;
• learn more about the issue or community that we’re interested in to help us plan our next steps in this space.

For most grants, we will have agreed some expectations with you during the grant set-up phase. As well as any expectations of how our funding might contribute to your work, these will have included how we thought both your organisation and our Foundation might benefit from our relationship. Please keep these in mind when preparing any report.

If you’d like to check these expectations or clarify anything, please don’t hesitate to contact your main contact at the Foundation. We will let you know in advance if there is anything else we are particularly interested to know.

We don’t have a standard report template. Instead, we’re happy for you to share with us any relevant report that you may have prepared for another funder, your board or other stakeholders. In some cases, your organisation’s annual report will suffice.

We’re also happy to accept a report at a time of year that makes most sense or is most convenient to you. Feel free to discuss this with your main contact. Otherwise, we’d normally expect a report just before the anniversary of your grant being approved or paid and will have set this out in the grant offer letter.

If you do prepare a report specifically for us, a couple of pages should be sufficient. If you’re not sure what to include, consider:

• What would you like us to know about your work and what has happened in your organisation over the past year?
• Any expectations we agreed with you regarding the grant – what are your reflections on these now?

Once we’ve received and read your report, we will send you any observations and feedback and let you know if we have any further questions. We may also be in touch to arrange a call so that we can discuss it further.

In some cases, we may waive the requirement for a written report and arrange a call or visit instead – if so, your main contact will be in touch well in advance.

We aim to take a flexible approach to enabling organisations to pursue their missions. We also want to learn about challenges to progress in the fields we work in, and for the third sector generally.

So please don’t hesitate to let us know of difficulties or challenges you encounter. We’re open to reviewing our expectations for our grant, including how and when the money is used, if necessary, or seeing if there’s anything else we can do to help.

All children and adults at risk have a right to protection and freedom from abuse or exploitation, regardless of age, disability, gender, racial heritage or racial culture, religious belief, sexual orientation, economic status or otherwise.

We are committed to proportionately assessing the safeguarding risks posed by work we fund and to taking appropriate action where concerns are identified.

We appreciate that every organisation is different and so we take a tailored approach
to considering safeguarding with each of our grantees – based on their individual context and the
level and type of risk they are exposed to. How closely we engage with you around your
organisation’s safeguarding practice will depend on:

• The level of vulnerability of any people you support or work with.
• The nature of your organisation and your work.

Please let us know about any serious safeguarding incidents that arise within your organisation relating to your staff, trustees, volunteers or activities which you may consider involving, or do involve, the police and/or a regulator in.

This is because we want to do what we can to support you should this kind of incident arise, as well as considering any protective actions that should be taken. If you need to inform us of an incident, please contact the lead Foundation staff member for your grant.

During our relationship with you, we may continue to ask you about safeguarding. This is to support our learning about your organisation and about good safeguarding practice.

We aim to add value to our funding relationships beyond the grant itself.

This includes connecting organisations to each other or to other opportunities that we are able to facilitate. See the events listed on the Working Together page and the resources below. Do let us know if you think we may be able to assist with any other introductions or opportunities.

Most of our grants are flexible – often partly or completely unrestricted – and we hope this supports our grantees to invest in their own organisational development. In some cases, we may be able to assist with development or capacity-building needs or signpost you to relevant sources of support, so you are welcome to raise these with us at any time.

We’d like you to acknowledge that you have received funding from us where and when it is reasonable and appropriate, depending on the purpose of the grant, and in proportion to any other funders.

This may be by displaying the William Grant Foundation logo or by the words ‘funded by the William Grant Foundation’.

You can download the logo in various formats from the Working Together page.

In notes to editors to accompany any press releases, please include the additional text:

The William Grant Foundation is a non-profit association established to support charitable causes in Scotland. Its work is funded by William Grant and Sons Ltd.

And include a link to this website (www.williamgrantfoundation.org.uk).

If you’d like to check anything or would like us to contribute a quote to a press release, please get in touch.

We publish information about all our UK grants of £2,000 or more using the 360 Giving open data standard. This means data about our grants can be easily shared, analysed and compared with other funders’, which benefits other funders, grant-seekers and anyone seeking to understand civil society better.

This means key details of your organisation, its location and the grant we have made will be in the public domain on the searchable database GrantNav.

We will send you details of how we propose to describe your grant at the same time as our grant offer. Please check this or let us know if for any reason you do not wish us to publish it.