Our Standards of Practice
- We will be approachable, friendly and helpful
- We will seek to treat all applicants and grantholders with equity and dignity and seek to be aware of our biases and privileges
- We will respect your knowledge and expertise
- We will trust and give you the space to deliver your project in the best way
- We will judge you on the quality of your idea not the quality of your writing
- We will be flexible and open to change
- We will let you know what is happening with your application and when you’ll hear from us
- We will always give you feedback on your application
- We will do what we can to make our funding accessible, and listen to you if you need to apply in a different way.
If you feel we’ve fallen short on what you should be able to expect from us please speak to your Grants Manager in the first instance – or you can follow our complaints procedures here.
Our Approach to grantmaking
Full cost recovery
We recognise and want to fully fund the trust costs of delivering project activity. We know that grantmakers have to meet their overheads to deliver excellent work from a secure foundation. See the CASS Business school or NPC for more information.
Paying the Living Wage
We are We are part of the Living Wage Funders scheme, a group of funders that support grant holders to pay the Living Wage and meet the cost of living. This means that we expect grantholders to pay at least the Living Wage on any staff posts supported by us, unless we agree there are good reasons for this not to happen.
You can read more to our approach to this Outline application statement about the Living Wage
.
Transparency and Accountability
We want to be open about the reasoning behind our funding decisions. All applicants receive feedback and all second stage applicants receive the relevant minute from the Trustee meeting where their application was discussed, so they can fully understand our decision. We believe transparency is an important basis for our relationship with grantholders.
We are the lead organizer of the Foundation Practice Rating which seeks to improve practice across the Foundation sector on the key themes of accountability, transparency and diversity.
Open data
We support the principles of open data and share our grants data as part of the 360Giving open data platform. We believe that with better information, grantmakers can be more effective and strategic decision makers. 360Giving provides support for grantmakers to publish their grants data openly, to understand their data, and to use the data to create online tools that make grant making more effective.
Our awarded grants (other than those made to individuals) since 2007 are available here
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. This means the data is freely accessible to anyone to be used and shared as they wish. The data must be attributed to Friends Provident Foundation. 
A Flexible, Partnership Approach
We work in partnership with grantholders to provide funding in a way best suited to their project and recognise that projects’ needs can change. We are open to discussion around the best way to set up a grant, and to making changes to it over time.
Learning Together
Our grant making programme is about creating change at an ambitious level and so requires brave and bold ideas. Sometimes these may not work as planned. We are open to learning from what works and what doesn’t and will support our grantholders in both situations.
Listening to your feedback
We listen and make changes in line with your feedback. Much of the shape of our current programme was developed in response to grantholder feedback FPFGranteeConsultation
