by Lindsay Nash | Jun 26, 2023 | Article
As the successor to Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe is set to run through 2027 and is designed to provide innovative solutions to overcome societal, ecological and economic challenges.
The engine driving a large swath of this funding is a cascade funding scheme, a way for businesses and organisations to apply for funding from the EU and then re-grant it to partners and people in their corresponding industries and communities.
For grantmakers, it’s a valuable opportunity to collaborate and build lasting impact and relationships across sectors and communities.
In this article, we’ll look at the broad funding opportunities that Horizon Europe presents and how to best manage and support high-impact projects through cascade funding in the EU.
To learn how to best manage cascade funding, we first need to understand where the money originates and how it is currently utilised across the EU.
Horizon Europe is the name of the EU research and innovation funding program. It tackles climate change, helps to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and boosts the EU’s competitiveness and growth.
Source: European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, Horizon Europe, the EU research and innovation programme (2021-27) – For a green, healthy, digital and inclusive Europe, Publications Office of the European Union, 2021
The program is divided into three pillars and one horizontal activity, focussing on:
Source: European Commission
Application for Horizon Europe funding happens online, and interested organisations can submit applications in the pillar or cluster of their choice on the European Commission’s website for Funding & tender opportunities.
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To help administer funds and drive collaboration across the pillars of Horizon Europe, grant managers employ cascade funding. Let’s take a look at what this actually means.
Cascade funding, also known as Financial Support for Third Parties (FSTP), is a European Commission mechanism to distribute public funding in order to assist beneficiaries, such as start-ups, scale-ups, SME and/or mid-caps, in the uptake or development of digital innovation.
See a current list of cascade funding open calls here.
Source: Sample cascade funding open calls via the European Commission’s Funding & Tenders Portal
For example, third parties who receive cascade funding from the programme enter into a contract with the consortium, or an EU partnership, of the EU-funded project. That consortium is responsible to the European Commission for any third parties to which they provide support. Less paperwork is required from a legal and financial standpoint, which makes it much easier for projects to have open calls for any projects.
These types of open calls usually provide non-repayable funding in the range of €50,000 to €200,000 per third party. With €95.5 billion in total available public funds, the opportunities for funding are enormous.
Cascade funding opens up a world of opportunity for SMEs and start-ups to participate in a European project without all the typical bureaucracy.
If your grantmaking organisation is (or wants to be) involved with the Horizon Europe project and funding, you undoubtedly have much to organise in the funding process. While the funding scheme opens up incredible funding opportunities to third parties to help you meet your goals and drive impact, it also requires an incredible amount of oversight on your part as the project coordinator.
Here are considerations when planning cascade funding management and tools available in Good Grants that can help!
The Commission defines a handful of important roles, starting when an organisation first decides to submit an FSTP or cascade funding proposal to post in the EU funding portal.
Here is a sampling of roles as defined by the Commission:
In Good Grants, a user’s role dictates which areas of the software platform a user has access to and what actions they are able to take in those locations. Certain default roles are provided when your account is created, though custom roles may be configured if necessary. This provides you with a way to set granular control and permissions across your team. You can name the roles in the platform as you see fit, matching them to the above EU-defined roles or creating your own. Learn more.
With so many moving parts, it’s critical to organise a communications strategy from the beginning to help manage cascade funding effectively. Status updates, program announcements, report requests and much more will be needed as you communicate with both your grantees and the EU project officer.
In Good Grants, we offer a wide range of communication options.
You can pre-configure email notifications or SMS messages that are sent by the platform based on a related trigger. Every account comes with default notifications, such as application moderated or submitted or a change in grant status. But these can be customised to fit your program. Learn more about notifications in Good Grants.
If you want to send bulk emails to program participants, you can do so with broadcast emails. It’s easy to create, schedule and send personalised email broadcasts from the platform. You can send these broadcasts in bulk to multiple, specific users of your choosing, and personalise them with merge tags and headers and footers with your branding. Learn more.
Cascade funding requires considerable collaboration between your team, your third-party grantees and the EU project officer. To help support your processes and to move grants through the cascade funding lifecycle, it’s helpful to create automated workflows where possible to cut down on repetitive tasks and save time. In Good Grants, workflows are created with our “action flow” feature, which enables you to configure a multi-stage workflow to move applications through your grant lifecycle automatically. It works well for application approval, nomination acceptance, in-depth review rounds and more.
Some third-party grantees in cascade funding have less experience with working on EU projects, and it is beneficial and encouraged to provide mentorship and guidance along the way. Perhaps you’ll want to offer assistance in the application process or advice and guidance during the implementation phase.
In Good Grants, you’ll have tools to help guide applicants through the application and any required grant reporting.
You can present information about your grants program in-context with application and review processes. Directly update and manage content immediately, including contextual information about your program to help guide your applicants and grantees through your processes.
If you want to provide feedback to your applicants and grantees, you can easily provide all review scores and/or comments as feedback to applicants.
If you want to connect mentors with grantees, you could use the Good Grants review tools to help match mentors with appropriate applicants. Your mentors can use the review tools to select the applicants or grantees they want to mentor through five different review modes.
It will be critical to keep up with where funding comes in, and where and when it goes out. You can do this easily in Good Grants, by centralising the process of awarding opportunities using built-in tools to formalise the grant agreement, manage funding and keep track of it all via a customisable grants dashboard.
Essential for safe funding commitments and funding decisions, Good Grants provides for the management of one or more funding budgets at the same time. You can take advantage of a compact, easy-to-use view of your budget totals, the impact of allocations on budgeted funds and even configure different budgets in different currencies if needed.
When you’re ready to allocate funds, you can draw from pre-configured funding budgets and send to each grantee or multiple grantees at the same time. (Use of this service does not attract any distribution fee or percentage-based fee for funds allocated.)
If your organisation assumes responsibility for any third-party grantees, it’s important to manage and mitigate any risk with thorough contractual documents and agreements.
In Good Grants, use our built-in contracts tool to solidify your agreement. Both you and your grantees have easy access to the signed contract for record-keeping. Create as many contracts as you need and assign as needed.
As your grants move through the lifecycle, you’ll need detailed reports and perhaps an audit log to track every action taken in your program.
In Good Grants, an enterprise account ensures program compliance with an audit log, which helps you maintain a detailed and searchable record of all user activity within your program. The feature is also available as an add-on for Premium accounts.
In conclusion, cascade funding is a vast opportunity for European projects to apply for and give funding to help advance innovation, research and development across the continent. And with the right management tools, your project and program will succeed and become a valuable part of the great Horizon Europe mission and impact.
Learn how Good Grants can help
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