By Vedat Mizrahi, Co-founder · 7 August 2026

Can a charity pay someone to write its grant application? What four funders actually say

It is one of the most common questions a small charity asks, and one of the least well answered online: if you have no fundraiser and no time, can you pay a consultant or a bid writer to fill in the form for you?

There is no single answer, because the rule belongs to the funder, not to the sector. Some funders publish an explicit prohibition. Most publish nothing at all. And the largest funder of small charities in the UK draws its line in a place that surprises most people who have heard of it second-hand. We went and read the funders' own pages rather than our records, and this is what they say.

The National Lottery Community Fund says no — and it says so on four separate programmes

The clearest published position belongs to The National Lottery Community Fund. Start with the programme most likely to matter to you, because England is where most small charities apply. National Lottery Awards for All England carries a dedicated sub-heading on its Who cannot apply page, headed “Applications from private businesses or consultants”:

“We do not accept applications written for you by private businesses, bid writers or consultants. Be wary of anyone who says they’re working on our behalf or are a preferred supplier — they’re not.”

That is worth pausing on for two reasons. It is the only one of the four programme statements we read that names bid writers as a category of their own, alongside consultants. And it is on the England programme — not tucked away in devolved-nation guidance, which is where a lot of second-hand summaries place this rule.

People and Places (Wales) states it twice, on two different pages, which makes it the strictest of the four in practice. Under Getting help with your application on the who-cannot-apply page: “Do not use a private business or consultant to write your application. We will not accept them. Some may claim they work with us or are approved by us, this is not true.” Then, independently, the programme's cost list bars “application-writing services or consultants” from what the grant money may be spent on. So the bar operates on who may draft the form and on whether that cost is fundable at all.

Awards for All Northern Ireland puts it in one flat line under the same sub-heading: “We do not accept applications written for you by private businesses or consultants.” No preferred-supplier warning, no mention of bid writers — the shortest of the four.

Dormant Assets for All (Northern Ireland) is the most interesting, and we will come back to it, because it points in both directions at once.

The distinction almost everyone gets wrong

Here is where the second-hand version of this rule goes astray. The prohibition is about who is paid to author the application. It is not about what software you used.

The same funder publishes a statement on artificial intelligence, and it is permissive in terms:

“You can use AI tools to help write your funding application. We will not reject an application just because AI was used.”

The statement names ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Claude, and says such tools “can support you if English is not your first language or if you're new to writing funding applications”. The Awards for All England programme page restates the same permission and attaches a qualifier that does the real work: the answers must be “accurate and reflect your own work”.

The same statement carries real cautions, and they are not decoration. The funder warns that what a model produces “is not as strong as it might appear”; that generic content “may disadvantage your application”; that assessors are looking for specifics from your own community rather than buzzwords; that budgets suggested by a model must be checked against the programme's own funding rules; that models can generate inaccurate information and you must verify it; that tools, especially the ones that cost nothing, may store what you type into them; and that there is a material environmental cost, which it quantifies as somewhere between 50 and 90 times the energy of a conventional search per query.

So the funder's line, in one sentence: a charity may use a tool to help it write its own application; it may not hand the authorship to a paid third party. Those are different things, and conflating them is how people end up believing that using a spellchecker with a language model in it puts their grant at risk. It does not, on this funder's published position.

The programme that cuts both ways

Dormant Assets for All is the sharpest illustration, because on one programme the funder both pays for consultants and refuses their authorship.

Consultancy is expressly fundable: “professional support, such as using a consultant or freelancer expertise” sits in the what-we-can-fund list, and the funder actively encourages applicants to get a few quotes so they choose the right support at a fair price. A consultant can be the thing you are asking for money for.

Authorship is barred twice over. On the who-cannot-apply page: “Do not use private businesses or consultants to write your application. Some may claim to act on our behalf, or say they are a preferred supplier.” A second paragraph states the consequence: “We will not accept applications written by them.” And in the cost rules: “You cannot use our funding to pay a consultant or freelancer to write your application” — the grant cannot cover “paying someone else to write your application” either.

Read together, the position is coherent: buy expertise, keep the pen.

Where these funders tell you to go instead

None of the four leaves you with nothing. Each names its own supported route, and they differ by nation. In Wales, the funder points to “trusted support organisations, like your local authority or County Voluntary Council (CVC)”, and offers to connect you with a funding officer in your area. In Northern Ireland, Dormant Assets for All names your local council and the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action (NICVA). In England, the Awards for All page simply says that if you are unsure about anything in the application you should contact them, and that they are happy to help.

That is the practical answer for a charity with no fundraiser: the infrastructure body in your area is the sanctioned route, and it is the one the funder will not penalise you for using.

What we do not know — and will not pretend to

This is the part most articles on this subject get wrong by omission. Having read the funder-wide pages of several other funders in our own set — Community Foundation for Northern Ireland (Randal Foundation), Foundation Scotland, Community Foundation North East, Quartet Community Foundation, Trust for London and Community Foundation Wales — we found no equivalent prohibition published on the pages we read.

That is an absence of evidence, and it is not permission. Two things make us cautious about it. The standing pattern is that these bars surface in detailed guidance rather than on headline pages — the Wales cost-list bar is exactly that shape. And several of these funders operate hundreds of individual named funds behind one set of common criteria; we read the common criteria, not every fund page. So the honest formulation is: no such restriction was found on the pages we read. Anyone who converts that into “this funder permits paid bid writers” has invented a fact.

Worth adding, because it is the flip side: at least two of those funders publish a position on AI-assisted drafting that is guidance rather than prohibition — take care with accuracy, keep the words your own, do not put personal data into a tool. That is broadly where The National Lottery Community Fund has landed too.

Our own position, stated against ourselves

We sell a paid application-support offer, so we have an interest here, and the honest thing is to say plainly where it collides with the rules above.

A paid human service that authors your application on your behalf cannot be used on these National Lottery Community Fund programmes. That is not a grey area and we are not going to sell around it. If you are applying to Awards for All in England or Northern Ireland, People and Places in Wales, or Dormant Assets for All, that route is closed to you regardless of who is offering it — us included.

A tool you drive yourself is a different case, and we want to be careful about how much we claim from that. The funder's stated position is about paid third-party authorship, and it expressly permits you to use tools to help you write your own application — with its own qualifier attached, that the answers must be “accurate and reflect your own work”. That is the funder describing a category, not clearing a product. No funder has approved any tool of ours, and the England page pre-emptively warns you about anyone who suggests otherwise: “Be wary of anyone who says they're working on our behalf or are a preferred supplier — they're not.” Apply that sentence to us as readily as to anyone else.

The practical test to apply to any supplier, including us: are they handing you a finished application to sign, or are they helping you produce your own? The first one is what these funders refuse. If you want the second, our application checklist for UK charities covers what a funder is actually looking for, and our guide to drafting help sets out what we do and do not do.

What to do before you pay anyone

Three checks, in order. First, open the funder's own who cannot apply page and read it to the end — on all four programmes above, the consultant paragraph sits at the bottom, after the organisation-type list, which is exactly where a skim-reader stops. Second, check the cost rules separately, because a funder can permit something in principle and refuse to pay for it; two of the four bar the cost as well as the practice. Third, if the pages are silent, treat that as unresolved rather than settled, and ask the funder directly — every one of these four publishes a contact route and invites the question.

And if a supplier tells you they are approved by a funder, or working on its behalf, check that claim with the funder before you pay. Two of the four programmes warn about that specific claim in their own words, which tells you how often it is made.

GrantNest is built around this principle: using an organisational profile to surface more relevant grants and tenders, then supporting the next step with practical application tools. To be clear about what that means in practice: grants are checked open on the funder's own page; tender coverage runs off the government's Find a Tender service rather than every local portal; profile matching is still in beta — a first filter to cut the noise, not the last word on whether you should apply; and application help is a checklist plus an editable opening draft, not a finished bid.

Every National Lottery Community Fund quotation above was read on the funder's own pages on 5 August 2026 — the who-cannot-apply pages for Awards for All England, Awards for All Northern Ireland, People and Places (Wales) and Dormant Assets for All; the cost pages for People and Places and Dormant Assets for All; the Awards for All England how-to-apply page; and the funder-wide statement on using artificial intelligence tools. The funder says of that AI statement that it may update its perspective as the technology evolves, so it is dated by nature. The paragraph on other funders rests on funder-wide pages read between 21 and 23 July 2026 and is described as such rather than dated to today. Guidance changes; check the page yourself before you act on it.