For funders
Your grantees are spending volunteer hours on governance they were never resourced to do. There is now a tool that fixes that, and it needs funders behind it.
The problem you are already paying for
Compliance is the hidden cost of every grant you make
When funders, government and local authorities move delivery into the third sector, the statutory obligations move with it. Safeguarding, data protection, employment, health and safety, financial controls, reporting: all of it lands on boards that are, in the main, volunteers. Nobody funds that work. It is done in evenings, from borrowed templates, by whichever trustee is willing.
You see the consequences from your side of the table. Applications that arrive incomplete. Due diligence that turns into a chase. Grantees who cannot evidence the governance you need them to have. Post-award problems that trace back to controls that were never really in place.
This is not a capability failure in the sector. It is an unfunded workload that everyone has agreed to pretend is free.
A grantee making the argument, not us
“This comes at a significant cost to the volunteers involved”
“In recognition that Charity Trustees in the main are volunteers then this system can only be described as a gift. It is all very well for funders, including the Scottish Government and Local Authorities to outsource work to the Third Sector but this comes at a significant cost to the volunteers involved. As many of the reporting requirements, practices, policies and governance structures are statutory requirements then thought needs to be given as to how best to support the Third Sector to achieve this.”
Ruth McCabe, Chairperson, Winchburgh Community Development Trust
That was written by a charity chair, unprompted, in feedback about a governance tool. She also described what the process was worth to her Trust: six hours of trustee time produced a full suite of governance documents, replacing work a volunteer had spent an entire autumn attempting alone.
Read her full account, and two more.
What the engine does today
Not a prototype. Scottish charities have run full sessions and adopted the output.
It advises, in the charity’s own situation
A board can ask a governance question in plain English and get an answer grounded in Scots law and real charity practice, calibrated to their structure, scale, workforce and activities. Not a search result, and not generic guidance written for someone else. This is the part that turns a compliance exercise into having an adviser available.
It finds the gap nobody knew about
It works from the legal baseline for that specific charity, so it surfaces obligations the board has never heard of. One charity discovered mid-session that it should have been registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office and was not, and had been for years. A charity cannot ask about a duty it does not know exists, and no template pack will ever raise it.
It produces evidence you can rely on
Every session yields an agreed document map recording what the board chose to build and what it deferred, a board plan in which the board records each adoption decision as it is made, a plain-English Executive Review that also records what was not prioritised and why, and adopt-ready policy documents in Word. That is exactly the material your due diligence asks for, prepared before you ask rather than assembled under pressure afterwards.
It is built on Scots law, deliberately
More than 70 Acts and regulations as they apply in Scotland, with a knowledge base drawn from Scottish regulatory guidance and real governance experience. Most freely available material a Scottish charity finds online was written for England and Wales, and the differences are not cosmetic.
The ask
Two ways a funder can get behind this
Both are open now, and both are conversations we would like to have.
Fund access for the charities you already support
Underwrite access for your grantees, or for a cohort in a place or a theme you care about, and they get the governance support you are currently relying on them to somehow provide themselves. Your grant money goes further because less of it is absorbed by trustees doing statutory work unpaid, and your portfolio is better placed to evidence sound governance. This works today, at whatever scale you want to start.
Shape it around what your programme actually requires
Applicant readiness before submission, the governance evidence your due diligence asks for, and support through restricted funds, conditions and reporting after award. We have designed this and deliberately not built it, because it should be shaped by people who run funding programmes rather than by us. If you want your cohort ready to your requirements rather than to our guess at them, now is the moment to be in the room.
Where the evidence stands
Scottish charities have taken the engine end to end and kept what it produced. Three have written about the experience under their own names, and you can read all three in full. The framework itself covers the full range of charity scale and complexity, and adjusts to the organisation in front of it.
Sessions are adviser-led, by design. The judgement about what a charity genuinely needs is the part that matters, and it is not something we intend to automate away.
Let us show you
The fastest way to judge this is to watch a real session rather than read about one. An hour, your questions, and a live look at what a charity actually walks away with.
If you fund Scottish charities and either route above is worth exploring, we would like to hear from you.