Application form questions and guidance notes
You can download the full list of application form questions and accompanying guidance notes for each application stage below:
Active Lives – application form questions & guidance notes
Positive Futures – application form questions & guidance notes
Application process
Before you start an application, please ensure you read the information about our grant programmes, particularly the eligibility criteria. The answers to most of the questions we get asked can be found either there or on our FAQs page.
Once you are sure that you are eligible to make an application you need to create an account with PHF. We ask for some basic details about you and the organisation you are applying on behalf of so that we can set you up on our system.
When you have done this you will be able to access the application portal immediately to start your grant application. You will have an option to log in on the screen, but you will also be sent an email confirmation with a link to the log in page. We recommend saving this email or bookmarking the log in page so that you can easily get back to the application portal in the future.
To submit an initial application, you will need to log into your application portal and complete all sections.
You don’t need to complete the whole form in one session. You can save your progress and return to the form later by logging back into the portal. Please make sure you save your application every 10-15 minutes to ensure you don’t lose your work. Some people prefer to draft their application form in a Word document and then copy the answers into the form when they are ready to submit.
Foundation staff review all initial applications. We may contact you to arrange a telephone discussion or virtual meeting to learn more about the need for your project and its likely impact.
After we complete our initial assessment, we will invite some applicants to submit additional information. Because we are so heavily oversubscribed, we are only able to invite a small number of charities to this second stage.
At this stage we will ask for additional information about your application, plus information about your organisation’s governance, finances and sustainability. There will also be an opportunity to respond to any questions raised in your phone call / virtual meeting.
We may also arrange a visit to see your work in action and to meet key stakeholders. Sometimes this is an online meeting.
If we would like you to submit additional information, we will contact you by email and provide a link to the form.
Foundation staff will prepare assessments of all shortlisted applications to be reviewed by the PHF Board of Trustees. All funding decisions are made by the Trustees.
If your application is not successful, we will notify you by email. PLEASE NOTE: The main reason for not funding projects is that we receive many more applications than we can support, and we inevitably have to disappoint many of the charities that apply to us. We regret that we have to turn down many good proposals, even though they may meet our criteria.
You can find out more about the number of applications we receive and the number of grants we award in the Grantmaking data section of the About our grant programmes page.
If your application is successful, we will notify you by email and then send you a grant offer letter detailing the full terms and conditions of the grant.
Find out more
Apply for a Positive Futures grant
Start an application for the Positive Futures grant programme
