How to fundraise from institutions

Institutional donor funding for international development NGOs provides regular, reliable, year-on-year resourcing for high quality development projects. However, such funds are highly competitive.

This guide gives you the essential information about the main UK/European institutional donors offering funding to UK NGOs to help you secure funding for your organisation.

Institutional donors are either government or other large-scale development agencies with high value, multi-annual funds. This guide looks at donors to UK-based civil society organisations, including:

• The UK government’s Department for International Development (DFID)
• The European Union (EU)
• Comic Relief
• The National Lottery Community Fund (formerly Big Lottery Fund).

Most of the grants programmes run by these donors operate on an open, two-stage competitive process: Stage 1 normally is a concept or summary stage, followed by invitation to submit a Stage 2 or full application.

This guide was originally published in 2017 and has been recently updated.

Check out our practical training courses on securing and managing institutional funding.

Get the latest trends in institutional and public fundraising at our Funding for Development Conference on 7 October.