Public Services Lab Blog

Prizes in practice

Daniel Oppenheimer - 16.12.2010

NESTA’s"Social Challenge Prize Guide" explains how to find exciting grassroots projects that actually deliver.

You’re a funder. You want to find and back grassroots organisations with fresh ideas that will actually work. But in practice you usually get either projects that are not new at all, or else they’re flaky bordering on the unachievable. Correctly-designed prizes can help avoid that.

Practical guide

Our Social Challenge Prize Guide sets out how to actually run a prize in practice, based on our two years’ experience of running the Big Green Challenge.

We don’t claim that this method can replace grants. But in a world with no money and tough problems to tackle, we think both Government and private funders need to use alternative approaches like this too

The guide is short and clear – I encourage you to read it. But to get you interested, here's a preview:

The classic grants process is like a job interview. Behind a large table are the interviewing panel, asking you questions, getting you to present – trying to figure out whether you are the best person for the job. If you pass, the job is yours. If you don’t, goodbye.

This process doesn’t make you any more likely to do a good job when you get there – it’s just a selection exercise. And it’s often not a very effective one. As we all know, being good at interviews is not quite the same as being good at the actual job. Even the safe candidate may turn out to be a dud. And “unusual” candidates are even riskier.  

Our social challenge prize approach is quite different. You start by just collecting as many ideas as possible, using a simple and easy process without complicated forms, demands for proof of previous track record, detailed business plans and so on. That maximises your chance of getting new groups and new ideas. Then you start to work with the most promising ideas, providing them with support to develop and improve their ideas. You keep narrowing down the group as the ideas firm up and it becomes clearer which are the most promising.

Gradually, as you narrow down the group, the projects are getting better and you know them better. Eventually you have something which is the funder’s ideal – fresh ideas from the grassroots that you can have a high degree of confidence in.