Forces in Mind Trust – New website to attract funding bids and communicate research insights

2019 – ongoing

Websites

Forces in Mind Trust (FiMT) is a foundation awarding grants, commissioning research and supporting projects that address the challenges of the Armed Forces community.

FiMT were looking for a new website that would be organised around their ‘change model’ and make it easier for others to use insights from the projects they fund. They also wanted to make their application process more intuitive for users.

Focused on outcomes

FiMT fund work across seven interconnecting outcome areas – criminal justice, health, housing, employment, finance, relationships and enablement. As well as a useful conceptual model for FiMT, these outcome areas provide a clear and understandable set of themes to help users navigate content and, as such, are given due prominence within the site architecture. This includes dedicated landing pages that provide an overview and automatically collate related projects, reports and news.

This approach helps FiMT to fulfil one of its key objectives of disseminating information and insights from the research and projects that it funds to the wider policy community.

Emphasising the approach to change

FiMT was founded by a £35m endowment from the National Lottery Community Fund and, as with many funders, they have put a great deal of thought into how they can effect the greatest change using the resources they have available to them. They also wanted to be as open as possible around what they call their ‘change model’, which incorporates four ‘change mechanisms’ – knowledge and evidence, influence and convening, collaboration and leadership, and capacity building.

To support this, we ensured that FiMT’s change mechanisms were clearly articulated on the website and, through its structure, provide a way of demonstrating how all of their funded work contributes towards their overall mission.

Improving the application process

It is essential for FiMT that they are able to attract a reasonable volume of high-quality applications from organisations seeking to conduct research or run projects. We worked with FiMT to design a process that walks users through a number of important steps before presenting them with the application form. They are encouraged to assess whether FiMT is the right funder for their project, assess their own eligibility and explore what makes a strong application.

Once users have submitted on the online application form all of their data is automatically added to Microsoft Dynamics, FiMT’s customer relationship management (CRM) system. New records are created or existing records are updated as appropriate.