Readers of our blog and social media posts will know that in 2022 we ran our first official Factory Of Magic workshop for young adults. Whilst all the magicians, and I, Dean Williamson, of The Factory have run workshops before we hadn’t done so under The Factory Of Magic moniker.

The initial workshops were a rounding success leading to our first case study which you can view here. Following this the publication we had been approached by a number of organisations to create further workshops (for both young adults and the grown ups!). Not only this but the charity Serendip Children’s Home contacted us as they were interested in funding us to provide more workshops. Everyone at The Factory was delighted at this news as we know how fantastic our workshops are and potentially life changing for students not to mention the rewarding nature of teaching people to be magicians.

During our initial conversations with Serendip Children’s Home we were advised that we had to submit a funding application. However, I have never applied for funding for anything and so I had to start the process completely from scratch. Despite having no experience I quickly researched what I needed to do and I am very pleased to say we have been successful in our funding application. We will reveal what this funding will go towards in due course…

Now, to whoever is in a similar position of applying for funding having no experience in doing so I would like to share my top three tips for completing your funding application:

• Funding criteria - every organisation is different so it’s very important to speak in depth with the supplier of funding to understand whether there are any specific criteria that must be met. In our case the document we produced had to centre around the impact our project would have on children and skills they would learn along the way
• Search for templates - Google is your friend! Type ‘funding application’ into the search engine of your choice to for free templates or inspiration (I found some great headings at least)
• Make it high level - you don’t necessarily need to write ‘‘War and Peace’’ for a funding application but make sure to cover the basics. In our case some of the detail could not be covered until the funding was approved such as the actual dates of the project commencing

Good luck in your funding application!