Applying for Sport England’s Community Investment Fund is a two-stage process. Sport England will assess your Stage 1 application, and will only encourage you to proceed to the full application (Stage 2) if your application meets regional priorities or has potential to do so.

Before beginning the funding process, you should have already read ‘About the Community Investment Fund’. Additional advice is also available in ‘Resources to help you’, which includes Frequently Asked Questions and an overview of the milestones we’ve put in place to help you understand what’s needed at each stage.

Stage 1 – Enquiry Stage
If you believe that your project can help deliver Sport England’s challenging goals you should proceed to the online funding application. You should only proceed if you have read the relevant Regional Sports Plan and Investment Strategy and fully explored other sources of funding. Sport England looks for partnership funding in all applications.

At this enquiry stage, you will be asked to provide relevant information about your organisation and your project. It will then measure the information against key Sport England eligibility criteria and the region’s primary strategic objectives. If your project does not meet eligibility criteria it will be automatically rejected.

What guidance is available? Guidance is provided by the side of each question. Please read this carefully as it tells you how to complete the question. In some cases if the wrong information is input, your application will be automatically rejected and not allow you to proceed any further.   

Assessing Stage 1 applications
Having successfully completed the online form, your application will be assessed in more detail by the relevant regional team. You will receive a decision within fifteen working days. This will either be an “encourage” meaning we would like you to proceed to a Stage 2 application or “discourage”. This means that based on the information provided we do not believe your project is likely to make a sufficient difference to regional priorities to warrant proceeding to the next stage.

Encourage
If the region believes that your project has potential to deliver against regional objectives you will receive an ‘encourage’ email. This will contain a link to Stage 2 guidance (which will be followed up by a letter from the Region) which will allow you to proceed to Stage 2 of the process. This means that we would like to develop your project proposals further against a number of milestones before considering whether you should submit a full Stage 2 application.

Please note an encourage email/letter does NOT guarantee funding and no commitment to spending towards the project should be made on the strength of this letter.

Discourage
Should you receive a discourage email (which will be followed up by a more detailed letter explaining the reasons why) the region believes that your project will not deliver sufficiently against the regional priorities to warrant encouraging and proceeding to Stage 2.

With a limited amount of funding available, Regional Sports Boards are only able to support those projects that are really going to make a significant difference (and can support this with appropriate information and data) in terms of meeting the regional priorities.

Those projects that do not have the potential to make a significant difference/impact are extremely unlikely to be successful at Stage 2, or Full Application stage. We therefore discourage projects from proceeding further so that potential applicants do not spend time putting together a detailed application which realistically does not have a chance of being funded.

For information about what’s needed at Stage 2 – please click here.