Welcome to the Community
If you’ve just arrived at advocacyfunding.co.uk, welcome! We’re here to help you maintain and grow your advocacy service. On this site you’ll find a whole load of resources dedicated to helping you write better bids for advocacy grants and tenders so you get more funding.
Using what you find here should help make you a better bid writer. It will improve your tendering skills – preparing, planning and writing so you give the best account of your organisation’s abilities. It will also improve your skills at writing bids for grant funders like charitable trusts and the Big Lottery.
What you find here will work equally well whoever your client group is.
What can I find here?
- Free email courses – sign up here for our six part how-to guide to producing better advocacy tenders
- Other free resources from time to time – let me know what’s bugging you and I’ll do my best to write something useful about it
- Information on who’s funding what in the world of advocacy
- Regular tweets on what’s happening in the world of advocacy
Who are you?
I’m Joe Roberson, a mental health advocate turned bid writer and service designer. I help advocacy organisations create better bids and better services so they get more funding and improve their impact. You can find out more about me here and read about how I became the UK’s only specialist Advocacy Bid Writer here.
Why are you doing this?
I became an advocate because I believe in the power of advocacy to transform people’s lives and change the way their services are provided.
But I know how difficult it is to sustain and grow stable advocacy services that can do it effectively and continuously. I did it successfully (and sometimes not so!) for seven years. Ironically, as the value of advocacy has become more recognised, finding funding has become harder.
But it is possible to find it.
Though I now run a business based on helping organisations do just that, my belief is that I can share as much as 90% of what I know how to do for free, and that if you need more than that, then you’ll likely want to pay for the extra help. You’ll find lots and lots of free information that should prove useful to you. If you ever get stuck or have a question, don’t hesitate to contact me and ask. I’m always here to be helpful.
What should I do next?
You could get started by signing up for our 6 part better tenders course. If you need anything drop me a line.