A £4.2m foundation has closed applications to a £300,000 grantmaking programme after finding that 45 per cent of applications failed to meet its funding criteria.

The Barratt Foundation Trust said its £300,000 grant programme would no longer accept applications in a bid to review the efficiency of the programme.

But the grantmaker said it would continue to donate more than £4m a year, including through its £3.7m-worth of other charitable programmes.

The grantmaker said it received more than 330 applications to its grantmaking programme over the past year, but 45 per cent of these failed to meet the foundation’s criteria. 

Andy Button-Stephens, head of the Barratt Foundation, said the grantmaker made “considerable efforts to publish clear and comprehensive criteria, guidelines and information for prospective applicants” and had hosted information sessions, adding that the team were “surprised” by the low success rate.

The most common ways that applications missed the mark included a failure to meet the funder’s geographic criteria, for example, where a charity only serves one town, area or county. 

Button-Stephens said these applications were considered for the grantmaker’s local community fund programme.

Some applicants were charities that were too large for the grantmaking programme’s criteria, with an income of more than £2m.

Others were not aligned with the charity’s funding priorities, while some were unsuccessful because they were not clear or compelling enough.

Having paused applications, the grantmaker said it was taking time to review the programme, with plans to make a smaller number of larger, multi-year donations with this programme’s funding.

The foundation will give out £150,000 over three years to six charities out of the 27 it has already been funding through this programme, all of which the grantmaker said “align with our purpose, had excellent applications and have high potential for future growth and impact”.

Button-Stephens said: “We like the accessibility and openness of an open grants programme, as we discover and learn about charities that are new to us, but it needs to be effective.”

He added that in future, the grantmaker was likely to open a more targeted grants programme with a two-stage process. 

This is expected to include an open and short expression of interest – which the grantmaker expects to have a high volume and low success rate – after which a smaller number of aligned charities will be invited to submit a more thorough application, which the grantmaker predicts will have a higher success rate.

Button-Stephens said: “We see this as a more effective and efficient way to allocate our limited resources to worthy and aligned charities.”