Grant and funding eligibility briefing for fan initiatives
Problem
Funding for accessible seating, sensory rooms, multi-language content or women's league growth programmes often comes from external schemes: local authority community grants, governing body diversity funds, accessibility charity grants. Each publishes its own PDF or web page of eligibility rules, deadlines and evidence requirements, and none of them look alike. Today someone on the fan engagement or CRM team downloads the documents, copies the key dates and conditions into a spreadsheet tab labelled something like 'Grants 2026', and re-reads the source by hand before each application round. Criteria change between rounds and the spreadsheet does not. An application is rejected months later because a clause about matched funding or evidence of prior consultation was missed the first time through.
Product idea
A research tool built around a single job: read a set of grant or funding criteria documents (uploaded PDFs or pasted links) alongside a written description of the planned fan engagement project, and produce a briefing that matches the project against each scheme's eligibility rules, deadlines and evidence requirements, with a citation back to the page and clause it came from. It flags where the project falls short of a stated condition rather than guessing at an interpretation. It does not rank schemes by likelihood of success, does not fill in or submit an application, and does not track spending once a grant is awarded. It is a reading aid for the person who currently does that reading by hand.
Who it is for
Head of fan engagement and CRM managers preparing accessibility or growth-programme funding applications, sponsored by the marketing manager who signs off the initiative before it goes to a funder.
Possible first version
A web form that accepts one or more uploaded criteria documents or pasted URLs plus a short written description of the planned initiative, and returns a structured briefing per scheme: eligibility conditions, deadline, evidence required, and a gap list against the project description, each point linked to its source page. Version one covers documents supplied by the user; it does not crawl funding body websites to find new schemes, does not pre-fill or submit an application, and does not connect to a budget or grants-tracking system. Scheme discovery and application workflow are left for a later phase.
- Build classification
- Micro-tool
- Rough effort
- 1-2 week prototype
- Roles involved
- Head of fan engagement, CRM manager, Marketing manager
- Relevant to
- Professional club, League office, Women's league, Venue & stadium operator, Esports property
- Systems in play
- Spreadsheets, Email and messaging platforms
- Product framing
- Research
Questions we get asked
What do we need to feed it before the first demonstration?
A written description of the planned initiative and the criteria documents for one or two funding schemes you already know about, as PDFs or links. The tool does not go looking for schemes on its own in version one; someone still has to know the scheme exists and hand over the source document. What it removes is the manual read-through and cross-check against the project, not the discovery step.
We already keep a grants spreadsheet with deadlines in it. Does this replace that?
No, and it should not try to. The spreadsheet is still where deadlines and application status live. This sits earlier in the process: reading each scheme's full criteria properly instead of skimming it once and copying three lines into a spreadsheet tab. Keep the spreadsheet for tracking. Use this when a new scheme appears or existing criteria change and someone has to read the document properly again.
What happens if the funding body updates its criteria after we've generated a briefing?
The briefing is only as current as the document it was given. It carries no memory of the funder's website and does not check for updates on its own, so a briefing from a previous round should be treated as expired once a new criteria document is published. Re-running it against the new document takes minutes, but someone still has to notice the update happened and supply it.
Does it decide whether we should apply?
No. It shows where the project matches or falls short of the stated conditions, with citations, so a person can make that call quickly rather than reading a fifteen-page criteria document from scratch. It does not score likelihood of success, does not draft the application, and does not submit anything. The decision to apply, and the writing, stay with the fan engagement or CRM team.
Is this your workflow?
Tell us one sports workflow that still runs on paper, spreadsheets, WhatsApp or an outdated system. We will map it and show you what a simpler product looks like.
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