Fundraising

Common Knowledge is funded through two streams, consultancy work and fundraising. In the former people pay us for services we provide. In the latter, we ask philanthropic foundations for money for us to do things.

The majority of our funding is from consultancy. We are trying to move to be funded more from fundraising that consultancy work, for a variety of reasons, expressed in the internal concept of The Pivot.

For Common Knowledge as for other organisations in civil society broadly, this comes under two headings.

Project based funding funds Common Knowledge to work on a specific project with specific outcomes in a specific timeline.

Core funding is what we and everyone else is really looking for: funding that just funds us to do and be Common Knowledge - it funds our organisation to fulfil its mission as such, without tying it to a specific project or outcome.

The former type of funding is thus far the only type of funding that Common Knowledge has got. The latter type of funding is rare in the UK philanthropic scene, though in the US is more common. A technique is often used is to find something that is your core mission, package it up as a project and get it funded on this basis, with a percentage of this budget going to general operational matters and overheads.

Fundraising is a subtle and complex art that often fundamentally comes down to relationship building with funders, aligning our interests with their interests and concerns. In a way consultancy work is more simple relationship. The organisations we work with have needs and we are paid to build things for them.

It is worth saying that the majority of consultancy work we do is ultimately funded by philanthropy and the same pool of funders we get direct funding from, or are seeking to get funding from in the future. Unless an organisation is something like a trade union, where the membership provide most of it's income.

Grants that Common Knowledge has got in the past

National Lottery Community Fund

In November 2020, we got a £62.161 grant in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic to meet new digital demand for national networks of community organisations.

Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust

In late 2020 we were awarded £12,720 to work with Autonomy on Work Force, which became the Transform Your Work toolkit. We wrote a case study on this work.

Civic Power Fund

In November 2022 we were awarded £15,000 from Civic Power Fund for work on digital infrastructures for community organising.

The Lipman-Miliband Trust

In 2019 we were awarded £5,000 for work on the Catalyst app we were building at the time. The vast majority of this funding went into our Spaces project.

Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung

Their London office have given us two grants, one in 2020 and another in 2021. These were for trade union digital infrastructure for the first grant where we worked extensively with UVW and for general digital infrastructure for social movements in the second. From this grant we build out Groundwork, amongst other things.

Lankelly Chase

In 2023 we have two projects that are funded by Lankelly Chase, but both are with another organisation leading the fundraising bid and thus immediately receiving the money. Digital security training with Tipping Point UK (£10,000 grant) and a tool on mapping the hostile environment on a local level with a new group, that we have not yet received.

Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust

We were awarded £56,000 to work on a project named Data Empowerment in the next General Election, which we internally have called mDEEP. The grant lasts from 17th of October 2023 to the 31st of March 2024.

During the 2024 General Election we were awarded £10,000 to continue this work.

Disrupt

Disrupt gave us a grant of £10,000 to work on our Join Flow product.

We have £60,000 core funding from Disrupt for 2025.

Paul Hamlyn Foundation

The Paul Hamlyn Foundation have committed to £150,000 over 3 years under the Migration Fund, that began in November 2024.

Gower Street

Gower Street gave us £10,000 during the 2024 General Election, for our work support civil society organisations during this period.

Our approach to fundraising

Fundraising is organising. Organising is relationships.