There's a report from 2023 that we keep coming back to. Published by Social Spider CIC and championed by the Enterprise Grants Taskforce, it made the case for something called enterprise grant-making, and even though it's a couple of years old now, the argument feels more relevant than ever.
So what is enterprise grant-making, and why should organisations running funding programmes care about it?
A Gap That Still Needs Filling
The report identified a fairly stark mismatch in the UK funding landscape. On one side, you have charities and social enterprises that are trying to build sustainable income from trading activities; selling services, generating revenue, becoming less dependent on grant funding over time. On the other side, you have funders whose grant programmes tend to fall into two camps: unrestricted funding or project-based grants. Neither is specifically designed to help organisations grow their enterprise capacity.
Enterprise grants sit in between. As the report defines it, they're an approach that "encourages and supports charities and social enterprises to increase or maintain their income from enterprise activities... largely through using funding conditions and/or incentives to encourage enterprise behaviour, often accompanied by capacity building."
At the time of the report, only around £2.6 million per year was clearly identifiable as meeting that definition, against a potential demand from over 25,000 social enterprises. That's a significant gap. And while the wider landscape of funding that supports enterprising activity was estimated to be much larger (somewhere between £22 million and £115 million annually), much of it wasn't designed with enterprise outcomes in mind.
Why This Still Matters in 2025
The underlying challenge described in the report (essentially “how do you fund organisations to become more sustainable, not just more active?”) hasn't gone away. If anything, the squeeze on public sector budgets and household incomes since then has made it more pressing.
Anna De Pulford, Chair of the Enterprise Grants Taskforce, put it well: funders are rightly being called to provide flexible, unrestricted funding, but developing enterprise requires specific skills and resources. It's not either/or; it's about having the right type of funding for the right purpose.
Alastair Wilson, CEO of the School for Social Entrepreneurs, went further, questioning whether the current infrastructure for grant administration was really designed to reach the communities and organisations that need it most. That's a challenge worth sitting with.
What This Means for How Programmes Are Designed and Run
For organisations running innovation or funding programmes, whether in government, healthcare, the charitable sector, or elsewhere, the enterprise grant-making conversation points to something important: the design of your programme matters as much as the funding itself.
Conditions and incentives that actively encourage enterprise behaviour. Capacity-building support built into the programme structure. Clear criteria that distinguish between organisations at different points on the journey from grant dependency to financial sustainability. These aren't just nice-to-haves; according to the report, they're what makes an enterprise grant actually work as intended.
That kind of programme design is more complex to run than a straightforward open call. It requires clear frameworks for applicant assessment, good visibility into what organisations are actually doing with the support, and the ability to manage a cohort of grantees who may be at very different stages.
The Technology Question
This is where we think about our own role at SimplyDo. Running a well-designed enterprise grants programme, or any innovation funding programme with real conditions and outcomes attached,puts significant demands on the people managing it. Tracking applicants, managing the assessment process, monitoring progress against enterprise targets, and understanding what's working across a whole portfolio: these are hard things to do well without the right infrastructure.
The report highlighted that demand for enterprise grants currently outstrips supply. Part of the reason for that, we'd suggest, is that running them well is genuinely hard without proper tooling. If the administrative overhead is too high, or if it's difficult to demonstrate impact to stakeholders, programmes don't scale.
SimplyDo is built to help organisations run complex, structured funding and innovation programmes, from open calls to multi-stage challenge funds to idea management at scale. The kind of thoughtful, conditions-based grant-making the Enterprise Grants Taskforce was advocating for is exactly the kind of programme our platform is designed to support.
Worth Reading (Even Now)
If you haven't come across the original report, it's worth a read. You can find it via the Funders Collaborative Hub. The specific numbers will have shifted since 2023, and the landscape continues to evolve. But the core argument in that there's a distinct and underserved need for grant-making that actively builds enterprise capability remains a compelling one.
If you're thinking about how to design a funding programme that genuinely supports organisational sustainability rather than just activity, we'd love to talk.
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