A foundation’s grant-making, translated to the web so the people who need funding can actually find it.

The Bennelong Foundation backs community-led change: grants for Australians facing barriers to education, training and employment, and for grassroots sport that brings communities in. They had just been through a rebrand, and the engagement was to carry that rebrand accurately onto the web, and to build the platform their grant-making runs through.

The strategy work put a face on the problem before any design happened. Research into the audience found that the people applying for grants are mostly time-poor leaders of small community organisations, worn down by funding processes that are opaque about eligibility, criteria and timelines. So the site’s first job became transparency: every grant program with a dedicated page stating clearly who can apply, what it funds, and how. The second job was reach: the foundation operates in both Australia and the United Kingdom, and one platform had to serve both, with each country’s grants clearly its own.

The platform went live with hundreds of content items in its archive, a search function built in, and a publishing setup the foundation’s own team runs without developers. Somewhere in the launch week is the review this work remembers best: told that the search function she had asked about was already being built, the foundation’s CEO replied, in full, “Amazeballs. Thank you.”

Foundations measure digital work the same way they measure grants: by whether it removes a barrier. This one was built to remove several.

2Countries served from one platform

Delivered as Solutions Architect at Supernormal Systems.