Grants Management service standards
Grants Management staff are service-oriented professionals and, as such, undertake to:
- provide clear guidance on each of our schemes, including details of eligibility criteria, deadlines and types of resources provided
- give accurate information about our application administration and assessment processes
- provide you with a named contact to lead on handling enquiries associated with your application
- process your application confidentially
- ensure that your application is assessed by individuals with appropriate expertise
- give you summary feedback on your full application after it has been assessed, relevant to the final decision reached
- ensure that no applicant receives less favourable treatment on the grounds of ethnicity, gender, health status, age, disability, sexual orientation, religious or political affiliation
- at all times, conduct themselves in a professional, courteous and helpful manner.
Grants Service Desk
The Grants Service Desk staff are happy to answer general queries about applications.
Service standards
Our Service Desk staff will always endeavour to answer all calls within five rings and will aim to respond to email enquiries within two working days.
During busy periods, callers can leave a short message together with a contact name and number for immediate call-back when a Service Desk staff member has finished the previous call.
The Service Desk will always try to resolve queries at first point of contact within two working days unless they require more specific advice from one of our Grants Management teams.
Escalation
If our Service Desk staff judge that a query requires a more detailed response, or cannot be resolved at first point of contact, it will be recorded, acknowledged and escalated within one working day to one of our Grants Management teams.
Complaints
If you are dissatisfied with any aspect of our services, or wish to make a complaint, please contact our
Service Desk who will log your complaint and ensure that it is forwarded to the right person at the Trust to respond.
Grants Operations teams
The Grants Operations teams will be happy to answer queries about specific applications.
Opening hours
Our Grants Operations teams are available to help you during normal office opening hours, from Monday to Friday 9.00-17.00 (GMT/BST).
Service Standards
We would be pleased to answer queries about specific applications or awards, which we would ask you to direct to the relevant team or to the named individual you have been given as a contact.
Initial enquiries prior to submission of proposals
- For enquiries that have been acknowledged and escalated from the Helpdesk team, or enquiries that are submitted directly to Grants Operations staff, we shall normally respond within five working days of receipt, except at published grant application deadlines when we shall endeavour to respond as promptly as possible. More complex queries might require more detailed investigation, but if so we shall inform you if this is the case and will aim to resolve these queries within ten working days of receipt.
- We shall respond to telephone messages within 48 hours.
Enquiries about submitted proposals
- We shall acknowledge receipt of applications within ten working days.
- We shall provide an outcome on submitted preliminary applications in line with the timescale provided on our website for Fellowships or within four weeks of receipt for other schemes.
- If you have submitted a grant application you will receive formal acknowledgement from a Grants Adviser, who will issue you with a unique six digit reference number, which you should use in all future correspondence. If you have not received the acknowledgement with your reference number within ten working days, please contact the Grants Service Desk to check the status of your submission.
- If any circumstances are likely to delay the processing of your application (e.g. eligibility issues, missing or contradictory information), we shall contact you within four weeks of acknowledging receipt of your proposal.
- We shall provide the outcome of applications within four weeks of the official confirmation of all Committee decisions. Please note that this confirmation date could be up to six weeks after individual Committees have met.
- If there are no outstanding queries on a grant recommended for funding, we will send out an award letter within four weeks of the confirmation date.