Cabinet Office
The Cabinet Office supports the Prime Minister and ensures the effective running of government. As the corporate headquarters for government, in partnership with HM Treasury, they take the lead in certain critical policy areas.
Resource constraints in identifying government grant opportunities
Organisations, charities and individuals lacked the resources to effectively find and apply for grant funding from the government.
As a grant applicant, they had to search various different sites and engage with multiple departments to be able to understand the opportunities or funding that existed within government. The Cabinet Office enlisted AND Digital’s support to see if technology could give them the answer.
The design and build of the ‘Find a Grant’ service
To address the challenge, user research was conducted in collaboration with the Cabinet Office Government Grants Management Function.
This research was critical, as ‘Find a Grant’ would be a national service used by all different types of entities and people, including charities, organisations and individuals.
After speaking to over 60 users during an 8-week Discovery period, a comprehensive report was produced, recommending areas to prototype and test.
In response to these needs, we used the GOV.UK design system library to prototype a consistent user interface, which was validated by testing before moving into a build phase. Post-launch user feedback surveys indicated a strong increase in user satisfaction as a result.
All front-end delivery was made in line with GDS accessibility standards, using Java for some back-end services, and JavaScript/TypeScript in the nodeJS context for some server-side development. Databases were deployed under AWS RDS using the Open Source PostgreSQL engine/database server. Overall deployment was under AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda for some processes/workloads.
AND Digital worked in a blended team with the Cabinet Office, bringing together a wide range of skill sets and experience. Creating this high performing team involved not only building a relationship and culture based on no-blame and trust, but also gaining a shared understanding of the context, and aligning on the outcomes and approaches.
As the work progressed, collaboration was maintained by constant communication across workstreams, with representatives from each team (interoperability, user research, data, etc), attending meetings to ensure that all decisions were feasible, and keeping accountability and transparency across teams.
After the successful build of the 'Find a Grant' service, the Cabinet Office appointed AND Digital for a further year to help them achieve their goals for the year, which included achieving interoperability between their different systems, and further improving the service for applicants and admins.
The foundation of the 'Find a Grant' service
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A simple, faster and fairer way to find government funding
Since the April launch, 'Find a Grant' has created a single place where people can go to understand the opportunities available that have applications for grant funding.
By March 2024, the number of users reached 230,000; 30,000 over the desired target. At the time of reporting, 377,000 notifications have been sent, notifying users that ‘new’ grants that match their saved searches, and to grant admins that they have submissions. A feature was added so that admins could rate the service, and currently has a score of 4.2 out of 5.
The service also now has over £9.4 billion worth of funding available for those to apply for through grants, which cannot be overstated.
The partnership between AND Digital and the Cabinet Office was one of openness, fun, passion, honesty and collaboration, and ultimately was about making sure both parties were on the same page; always bringing it back to the needs of the user, to ensure the right recommendations were being made for the service.
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