In today’s rapidly evolving social and environmental landscape, for many organisations, community investment is no longer a nice-to-have — it’s a strategic imperative.
Whether you’re a housing association, utility provider, local authority, or business with a mandate to support local communities, you’re likely facing rising pressure to deliver more impact with fewer resources.
From aligning with ESG or Social Value goals to navigating complex reporting requirements, and often on tight budgets, running a successful and effective community investment fund is harder than ever.
But it doesn’t have to be.
By rethinking how you design and manage your programmes, you can fund local change that’s faster, more authentic, and easier to deliver — without increasing overheads.
Here’s how to build an effective community investment fund in six steps.
Step 1: Define clear objectives and criteria for your community investment fund
A successful community investment programme starts with clarity. Set strategic goals that align with your organisation’s ESG, CSR, or social value commitments. Here are some things to think about:
- Define what success looks like.
- For example, are you aiming to improve community wellbeing, increase access to education and employment, or promote local conservation and sustainability practices?
- For example, are you aiming to improve community wellbeing, increase access to education and employment, or promote local conservation and sustainability practices?
- Establish eligibility criteria for your community investment fund that match your priorities.
- Fund focus areas which strategically align with ESG goals, social value policies, customer or client priorities, or to meet specific åtender criteria.
- Think about which specific locations and focus areas to target your funds at, and which beneficiary groups you aim to reach.
- Focus on hypertargeted locations that align with your business goals.
- Align your giving with locations that matter to your operations and your stakeholders, whether that be key project locations, local authorities you’re working within/in partnership with, or where your customers or residents are based.
- Set meaningful KPIs upfront to ensure impact is measurable and relevant, focusing on social value outcomes as well as outputs.
With ActionFunder, you can fully customise your fund criteria to align with your goals, custom location area(s), and target beneficiaries, so you’ll only receive applications from relevant non-profits with projects aligned to your KPIs.
Step 2: Streamline your grant management process
Traditional grant-making processes are often slow, labourious, and admin-heavy, creating a resource drain on your team and limiting how much you can achieve.
Complex manual processes also introduce more risk because there’s more room for human error when handling large amounts of data and navigating various processes!
Automating time-intensive and repetitive tasks ensures funds are distributed more quickly, securely, and compliantly.
To improve efficiency and win time back, outsource and automate some of the most time-intensive parts of the community investment process — from shortlisting and due diligence checks, to processing payments and impact data collection.
ActionFunder’s end-to-end grant management platform uses AI-powered tools to handle all these steps for you. This frees up your team’s time for more valuable tasks like strategy, fundraising, and community engagement.
“Before using ActionFunder we were spending a full week every month on the basic admin for our community investment fund, whereas now it takes half a day. ActionFunder enables us to make a wider impact in the community by giving us that time back.”
Olivia Crisp, (previous) Community Engagement Leader – South West Water
Step 3: Fund community investment projects that address real local needs
The most effective community investment happens when you fund local organisations that are embedded in the community and understand the local challenges and ecosystem.
Look beyond your existing networks to identify grassroots organisations already working within and trusted by their communities.
Use up-to-date, localised data to understand the needs and challenges faced in your target locations and match them to high-impact projects.
Make your community investment inclusive by removing barriers that can exclude smaller VCSEs (voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations) delivering vital services.
Common barriers include lengthy and repetitive application forms, multiple due diligence checks across funders, and eligibility rules that exclude unregistered voluntary non-profits.
ActionFunder connects you with thousands of ready-to-fund, verified community partners, using live data to match your fund with the right projects.
Step 4: Enable proportionate, accessible applications
Your application process should be fit for purpose and inclusive. Keep application forms short, simple, and proportionate to the size of the fund.
This will support small charities and community groups that lack dedicated fundraising teams or grant-writing experience.
By reducing the administrative burden on applicants, you make it easier for them to access funding, and you’ll have a richer pool of high-impact applicants to choose from.
ActionFunder’s intuitive platform simplifies the application process for non-profits, making it easier for small charities and community organisations to access funding, while still asking the important questions, without increasing risk or sacrificing on due diligence.
Step 5: Track and report your impact
Proving the value of your community investment should be straightforward. But so often it’s hard to collate the impact data you need. We all know what it’s like to spend weeks or even months chasing the reporting metrics needed!
What if instead of endless emails chasing and juggling spreadsheets, you could instantly access the data you need via real-time dashboards?
ActionFunder provides dynamic dashboards and automated reporting, so you can easily track delivery against your KPIs and commitments.
But we know that community investment is about more than data and boardroom reports.
Go beyond the numbers and bring your impact to life by combining quantitative data with stories, photos, and quotes that humanise the outcomes and track the delivery of the projects in real time.
Use ActionFunder’s ready-to-share updates give you images, videos and real-time project updates, so you can show the human side of your community investment.
Share all of this in ready-made reports to showcase the results of your programme with internal and external stakeholders in a compelling way.
“Those project updates tell 100 stories.”
Hannah Monck, Funding and Grants Manager – SNG
Step 6: Celebrate success and scale what works
Once your fund is delivering impact, it’s time to amplify and expand that success. Share results internally and externally to increase stakeholder buy-in and secure future funding.
Use insights to refine your next funding round and replicate what worked well.
With ActionFunder, replicating and scaling your community investment programme is easy — the platform takes care of admin, project matching, and reporting, so all you need to do is fund more projects. No extra staff or systems required.
Ready to build a smarter community investment fund?
Community investment doesn’t have to be resource-heavy or slow to deliver. With the right strategy and the right platform, you can fund the projects that matter most, faster and with greater confidence.
Whether you’re launching a new fund or improving an existing one, ActionFunder helps you give more effectively — with less admin and more impact.
