Heya all,

So me and stef just met the lottery and they were really nice. Bottom line is acceptance rate atm is about 3% so if something is not hitting all the criteria highly it's not getting funded.

While they liked it overall, our two weaknesses were:

- Scaling plan -- they admitted they didnt really get it but also wanted far more specifics (what groups / what areas of the country / how many people / etc)

- Impact -- this is a million quid what do we get for it? This has long been where we struggle -- "its important that information exists" isnt quite enough for the lottery -- they want that social impact even while acknowledging the bullshittness that can be (again - 3% acceptance).

They also said that the growing great ideas framework we did stuff under previously was a different CEO and a different strategy -- so including all that was prob a waste of word count, lol. Imagine a funder sticking to a consistent strategy for more than 3 years.

Next steps are me and Stef are gonna meet next week, go through all the fieldwork notes and think about how we can represent impact and maybe try and get some funding just to write that all up. If anyone has a resource here to do an evaluation that would be great -- for example, could someone do an external evaluation of The Trans Dimension, Tech Hub or Resiliance Web?

In general it sounds like we deffo impressed them and its worth reapplying -- but we are doing it from scratch again now. So down but not out and we will deffo be pursing it.

Kim