Funding public engagement

Funding your public engagement activities can often be the first hurdle to running your own events. Thankfully there are a wide-range of different sources of funding available from large grants from charities and public bodies to society and private sponsorship. The best place to search for Public Engagement grant funding is on the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement's website, where they have details of a wide range of funding opportunities.

Find out more about how to secure public engagement funding when writing your research grant applications in our Funding Public Engagement through Research Grants section on this page.

Pivot-RP Funding Opportunities Database

The University now subscribes to Pivot-RP (previously known as Research Professional), which is a comprehensive online database of research funding opportunities from UK, European and International funders across all disciplines. Pivot-RP also includes many different funding streams that support engagement activity.

This new service unifies the Pivot® and Research Professional funding solutions. These services will soon be available on one website, but for the moment funding call information is available through Pivot-RP and all other information is available through Research Professional. Research Professional can be accessed using your University credentials.

Although this will be available for Pivot-RP in the near future, users must currently sign up with a University email address (click 'create account' on pivot.proquest website).

Pivot-RP provides an extensive collection of training documents, and collections of training videos are available on the Pivot-RP YouTube website. 

Pivot-RP gives access to tens of thousands of funding opportunities a single, editorially curated database. The database covers a wide variety of funding types, and includes national and international funders. Funding opportunity recommendations can be tailored to your unique profile, and opportunities of interest tracked to generate alerts on deadlines and other significant changes.

Research Professional contains a wealth of informative and helpful information, including research funding and policy news. The Know How section provides articles on topics such as the essential components of funding success (including advice from successful applicants), advice for Early Careers Researchers, impact and dissemination, working internationally, and UK publicly funded agencies and policymakers.

Any queries should be directed to Emma Warbrick.

Funding Public Engagement within Research Applications and Grants

One of the best routes to secure funding for public engagement activities is by requesting funds when writing research grants.

Applicants to UKRI funding schemes should consider how they will or might achieve impact throughout their projects and include this as part of their case for support. Pathways to Impact encourage you to think about what can be done to ensure your research makes a difference. Activities to realise impact do not have to be cost-incurring, but relevant costs can be included and must be fully justified within the resources statement.

UKRI grants represent a good opportunity to provide upfront financial support for public engagement. Securing funding in advance benefits everyone; supporting planning and increasing the chance of delivering public engagement activity with greater impact. You may find UKRI's Impact case studies pages useful.

This process asks researchers to integrate the public engagement activity with their research outcomes. This integrated approach is a central principle of the assessment of impact in the Research Excellence Framework (REF).