Publications

Webinar 1-Tips for Completing your Equally Safe Application

In this webinar we will provide you with an overview and tips for your Delivering Equally Safe application.

This is the first in a series of webinars that include advice for setting your budget, support developing your outcomes and advice about working in partnerships.

Transcript

Slide 1: Welcome

Welcome to this webinar where we will provide you with an overview and tips for your Delivering Equally Safe application.

This is the first in a series of webinars that include advice for setting your budget, support developing your outcomes and advice about working in partnerships.

Slide 2: Meet the team

My name is Norma and I am a part of the Delivering Equally Safe team here at Inspiring Scotland. We are working on behalf of the Scottish Government to manage the Delivering Equally Safe Fund. On this slide you can see some of the other members of our team.

Slide 3: What we’ll cover

In this webinar I will give you a brief overview of the Delivering Equally Safe fund.

We will go through some general funding tips and things to think about before starting your application, before discussing some things you should know about completing the application form and what to check before you hit submit.

Slide 4: Delivering Equally Safe

The Delivering Equally Safe Fund will provide £18m of Scottish Government funding to organisations and public sector bodies for work focused on tackling violence against women and girls in Scotland.

It replaces existing funds including Equally Safe (VAWG) fund and Rape Crisis Specific funds. In bringing all the funds together the Scottish Government wanted to create a simpler and cohesive method for organisations to access funding, whilst strengthening accountability mechanisms.

Delivering Equally Safe supports the priorities and outcomes of Equally Safe, the joint strategy from the Scottish Government and COSLA

A minimum of £14m has been secured for frontline specialist services to support their ongoing work. These are services whose core purpose is the provision of specialist support to survivors of gender based violence. DES will also fund prevention work and new and innovative projects which have been developed to support people affected by gender-based violence.

Slide 5: Equally Safe Strategy

Your application to Delivering Equally Safe must support the priorities and outcomes of Equally Safe:  which is Scotland’s Strategy for Preventing and Eradicating Violence Against Women and Girls and was launched in 2014 and then revised in 2016.

These priorities are:

• Scottish society embraces equality and mutual respect, and rejects all forms of violence against women and girls
• Women and girls thrive as equal citizens – socially, culturally, economically, and politically
• Interventions are early and effective, preventing violence and maximising the safety and wellbeing of women, children, and young people
• Men desist from all forms of violence against women and girls, and perpetrators of such violence receive a robust and effective response

Slide 6: Delivering Equally Safe Priorities

Delivering Equally Safe funding is aimed at supporting at least one or a combination of:

• primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention of violence
• early intervention for victim-survivors
• front-line service support
• driving attitudinal or behaviour change
• supporting policy development and practice

When you are developing your application you should keep these aims and focus in mind.

Slide 7: Application timeline

The fund is open to applications until midday on the 28^th May 2021. This deadline was recently extended following some changes to the fund which you can learn about on our website or later in this series.

If you apply to the fund you will be notified of the outcome of your application in July 2021 and, if successful, funding will commence in October.

Slide 8: Application tips – before you begin

So, before you start completing any funding application there are a number of things that you can do to prepare.

Firstly, read the guidance. This might seem obvious, but there is a lot of information and advice in these documents, and it will allow you to start thinking about what you are wanting to apply for and to see if the fund is a good match for what you want to achieve, as well as whether your work is a good match for what the fund wants to achieve

Make sure that you are eligible to apply and that the activities you are planning are eligible under the guidance

Start to compile evidence from people you have worked with – service users and partners. Also build up evidence of need in your geographic area and with the people you are aiming to support. Show that there is a demand for what you do and the impact that you will make. Remember the assessor might not know what your area is like in terms of deprivation or other accessible services, so make sure you explain the context you work in.

Start to gather all the supporting documentation early on in the process, and not just at the last minute as you are preparing to submit your application. It would be such a waste to have spent months developing your application, only to realise that you don’t have a copy of your most recent accounts to hand, or that your governing document hasn’t been updated and doesn’t allow you to do what you want to do. You can also use this as an opportunity to check your governing documents and make sure they are fit for purpose.

We recommend starting a folder for documents related to your application. This can be useful for other funding applications as well as most will be asking for similar things. You can use the  word document to draft your application and move it online once you have finalised your answers.

Decide who is going to lead on writing the application. While it is good to have information and opinions from a wide range of people on your team and partnerships, it is best to have one person taking the lead on writing the application to ensure consistency of style.

Slide 9: Support to develop your application

We have developed a range of information to support you in developing your application including a Guidance document, our regularly updated FAQs and this webinar series. You can also book one to one surgery sessions and email enquiries directly to us.

We cannot help you to write your application or review any drafts you have however, we will try to answer questions about your application if we can. We will also use these to update our FAQ document to help support you.

Where available, we recommend you ask someone who doesn’t know your project so well, to read your draft application and give you feedback, so that you can check that it makes sense to someone outwith your project and that it is likely to answer all the questions that an assessor might have?

Slide 10: Section 1 – All about you

Section one of the application is all about your organization or public sector body. We want to know about your organization, and how it is managed. For Local authority projects, this should be about the project and how it will be managed.

Tell us about your legal status, We want to know about your governance and how your organization is managed – how many board members you have? What policies you have in place that guide your work.

In this section you should also detail how you manage your organisations finances and ensure that you have clear guidance in place to make sure that you have separation of financial duties so that one person cannot authorise, make, AND record payments.

We are also asking for headline figures for the previous three financial years to allow us to get an insight into your track record. If you are a new organization please use the narrative box to explain that and to give us as much information as you can.

Slide 11: Your connections with local partners

Question 1.13 allows applicants to detail the connections they have with local partners including Violence Against Women Partnerships.

If you do not have a connection with your violence against women partnership we would ask you to explain why and would encourage you to establish one.

In this question you should also discuss your connections with the National Violence Against Women Network or your local multi agency partnerships such as  MAPs,  and MARACs.

Slide 12: Section 2 – About your work

In section 2 we will be looking at what you are hoping to do – what will you do with the Funding?

As well as providing a brief overview of what the funding is for in terms of staff and roles this section requires you to focus on your activities, the need for this work and the impact and difference that it will make.

There is detailed information in the Application Guidance Notes on how to complete each question. This section is your opportunity to tell us how and why you want to carry out this work. You should detail the activity you will do and how this links with the Equally Safe strategy. When describing the need your work will address you should provide evidence of both the current and ongoing need.

Evidence of need may come from past project evaluations, pilot projects, consultations, waiting lists, surveys, research, national or local statistics. This could include information on current service users and/or your partnership work.

Slide 13: Gendered Analysis

You are also asked about how you work to a gendered analysis of violence against women and girls; and the specific steps that your proposed project will take to embed this gendered approach.

A gendered analysis of violence against women and girls recognises that gender-based violence is intrinsically linked to gender inequality. You can find the governments definition in the application guidance and also see it on the slide.

Slide 14: Setting you outcomes

You should detail between two and six outcomes – these should reflect what you plan to do. Remember this Fund is for a wide range of organisations, large and small, local and national as well as those focused on strategic work. Your outcomes should be relevant to your needs and reflect the change you hope to achieve with people/or society.

When you are describing your activities please try to include numbers such as the number of events or people that you will be working with.

Remember your outcomes must clearly link to the relevant Equally Safe and National Performance Framework outcomes.

During the fund you will be expected to provide reports updating us on your progress. Monitoring allows you to measure what you have achieved and compare this with what you hoped to achieve or the outcomes you had planned. Monitoring is something that you will do throughout your work and it will allow you check you are on the right track or refocus if needed. Evaluation is the retrospective assessment of your work and you can build the costs of this into your budget. In your application you should tell us who will be responsible for carrying out both monitoring and evaluation, what techniques they will use and when.

We have produced another webinar which specifically focuses on setting your outcomes and activities so for more information on this area please take a look.

Slide 15: Staffing & Budgets

The application will then look for information on staffing and your proposed budget for the coming three years.

You can apply for existing staff costs or new costs – we will be asking if they are core staff or project staff.

We will also be asking about the training and support arrangements for staff and what accreditation you require for them

If you provide counselling, psychological or therapeutic support we want to know what specific therapies will be carried out, and what accreditation the staff have. So again, start gathering this  evidence early

We have produced another webinar with advice on how to complete your budget

Slide 16: Core or Project costs

Delivering Equally Safe can fund both core and project costs. When completing your application and budget we ask you to identify which costs are ‘core’ and which costs are ‘project’.

By core costs we mean contributions towards core expenses such as the salaries for management staff and other direct support staff. Core costs can also be known as operating or central costs and describe the essential running costs for a charity on an ongoing basis.

Project costs are those which contribute to delivery of a time bound activity or a specific piece of work. These may be for things like, external facilitators, additional staff to deliver a specific project or events costs.

Slide 17: Supporting Documents

In addition to the application form, you will need to upload and submit a number of additional documents. We recommend giving yourself plenty time to gather these documents. If you are unsure about how to complete any of the supporting documents please get in touch.

Slide 18 – Before you submit

Before you press submit please read through your applications, check you have answered all the essential questions and included the relevant additional documents.

The deadline for completed applications is midday on the 28^th May.

Slide 19 – Thank You

We hope this webinar has been helpful. If you need further support please get in touch with us on DESenquiries@inspiringscotland.org.uk or visit our website for further resources.

Thank you