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This page outlines the criteria to be used for assessment of The National Archives’ Records at Risk Grants. It is written to assist applicants and panel members, when writing and scoring proposals.
The aim of the Records at Risk Grants Programme is to ensure the preservation of significant collections in situations of immediate peril.
It is assessed on the following four criteria:
- Significance
- Need
- Impact
- Delivery and Management
Each application will be scored numerically by each panellist, against each of the criteria above, according to the following scale:
| Score | Rating |
| 1 | Poor |
| 2 | Low |
| 3 | Good |
| 4 | Excellent |
| 5 | Outstanding |
Further information on each criterion is given below. This information is not intended to be exhaustive: an outstanding answer may not cover all of the points mentioned, and/or may cover other points as appropriate to the applicant and their project.
However, the information below should assist applicants in writing successful proposals, and will be provided to each panellist to guide their assessment.
1. Significance
The National Archives is committed to supporting the preservation and use of significant archival collections within the United Kingdom. You should aim to outline why your collection is important, unique and of clear value to your audiences, today and in the future.
Significance may be different for different audiences that engage with a collection, and it may be helpful to consider who they are. An academic may have a different goal, when engaging with a collection, than a family historian or community representative.
The prompts below may help you to think about why and how your collection is significant, but you do not need to cover all of them – you should focus your answer on your collection’s areas of strength:
- Provenance: who created, collected and has used the collection.
- Rarity: whether the collection is unique or unusual, and if it is a particularly fine example of a collection of its type.
- Condition and Completeness: whether the collection is intact and in good condition, and if its condition can tell us anything about its history, ownership or use.
- Historical, Cultural or Scientific Meaning: how the collection tells the story of particular people, groups, organisations, events, places, beliefs, or practices; whether it has special historic or cultural interest for an audience, region or community; whether and how it could be used for academic research; and whether it enriches or fills in gaps in other collections, at your organisation or elsewhere.
- Sensory and Emotional Impact: whether the collection has strong visual/sensory impact, or evokes a strong personal or cultural response; and whether the language, format, technique, design or style reflect outstanding creativity or innovation.
- Marketing and Exploitability: whether the collection could support marketing, income generation or profile-raising for your organisation or community.
Please ensure that the focus of your response is on the collection that you are intending to work with. The significance of the wider collections in your archive can be important, but your main focus should be on the collection that you are applying for.
If you want to find out more about significance statements, there is detailed guidance in this video: Archives Revealed: How to conduct a significance assessment and write a significance statement – YouTube.
2. Need
Tell us why your project is needed, and why it is needed now.
You might want to tell us about a particular problem or challenge which you are seeking to address. This might be (for Records at Risk Grants), an immediate issue, such as a physical or organisational threat to a collection: what is the collection’s condition, and is it at risk from mould, pests, damage or obsolescence? What is its environment, for physical or digital storage? Is the organisation holding the collection at risk, from closure or liquidation?
Or it may be a longer-term problem, such as a longer-term issue with your collection or archive service, which can only be addressed by an investment in skills, outside expertise, equipment or staff time. Have you identified (for Skills Bursaries) a particular skills gap, such as in digital transformation, environmental sustainability, or equity, diversity and inclusion – or (for Resilience Grants), a weaker area on the Archives Service Resilience Indicator?
You may also want to capitalise on particular opportunities: whether there are local strategies or wider initiatives which make the project timely, or whether there is other funding or partnerships which are immediately available. What will happen if you do not get a grant from us?
It’s important to outline why the grant provides a solution or partial solution to the challenge, and why it is important for the investment to occur now. It may be helpful to include evidence supporting this answer: for example, you could include photographs or supporting letters.
Every archive service will have different needs, both short-term and long-term: use this response to tell us what they are.
3. Impact
We define impact as “the demonstrable contribution that a project makes.” Tell us why your project is going to change things: for you, for your archive service, for your users and audiences, for the archives sector, or for society. We want to understand what difference your proposal will make, and what change will result from the project, and for whom.
Ask yourself ‘what will happen?’ What are the short-term, medium-term and long-term changes that the project will bring about, and who will be affected? Is the change physical (new resources, materials or capital), procedural, or cultural?
Impact should scale according to the size of the grant being provided: for smaller grants, impact may be personal (new skills or learning), or institutional (such as improved ways of working within your archive service). For larger grants, strong applications will evidence impact beyond their own organisation. Please read the question carefully, to ensure that you are focusing your answer on the relevant areas of focus.
It is also important to consider the impact that your project will have on users of your archive. The users of archives can be diverse, with audiences having different motivations and needs from your service. You are best placed to understand who your audiences are, and who they could be: it might be helpful to explain the change you want to bring about, in how existing users interact with your service and collections, and/or in how you reach new audiences.
You may wish to outline how you intend to engage with audiences outside of your institution: do you have plans or partnerships in place, to engage with (for example) your local community, researchers, schools or higher education?
It is important to consider how the grant will have an impact beyond its own duration, and create a sustainable legacy of change: is this project part of a longer-term strategic plan, and how does it align with other activities or the future direction of the organisation?
Impact can take many different forms, and every project will have a different response: but a strong answer will always clearly outline what outcomes it is seeking to create, and how it plans to engage with beneficiaries and audiences, inside and outside of the archive service which is applying.
4. Delivery and Management
When giving a grant, we need to be confident that it is possible to deliver every project that we fund, within the organisation and with the team you have available. Use this question to fully explain how you intend to carry out the project’s activities, spend its budget and achieve its delivery milestones.
We would like to understand in detail what you are proposing to do, who will deliver the project and what skills they have. Please tell us who has overall responsibility for the project, and who else is involved. Will you be working with a professional archivist? What types of posts do you need, and how are they paid? (You may wish to refer to ARA’s salary recommendations: Salary Recommendations from our Pay Review Group — Archives & Records Association). Are new staff being hired, or are you using existing staff; if so, how are their existing responsibilities being covered? Are you using volunteers, and how will they be managed and supported?
Please provide a rationale for any non-staff expenditure that you need to deliver your project, and how you plan to procure any resources you need, if you don’t have access to them already.
If your project involves multiple institutions, tell us how the relationship between the partners will be managed and governed, and how work will be divided and structured.
Tell us how you are going to manage your project, to ensure that it keeps on track – you may wish to attach a Gantt Chart or similar project planning tool, particularly for larger projects. In most grant programmes, we will ask you to outline at least three key milestones that need to be achieved to ensure your project’s success.
Finally, you may want to think about the risks that your project faces, and what mitigations you will be putting in place to address them.