Contents
1. Overview
The BFI National Lottery Screen Heritage Fund (Project funding programme) supports ambitious, audience-facing projects that ensure more people can engage with heritage collections that better reflect the diversity of the UK; build a thriving screen heritage sector; unlock the UK’s screen heritage for education and enjoyment; and help enable everyone to experience a greater range of screen culture.
We support audience-facing activity that helps screen heritage collections better represent the UK’s diverse communities; expand their audience reach and access with a focus on underserved and underrepresented communities; and/or address the shared national challenge focused on collecting contemporary screen works. We are seeking proposals that are creative and ambitious and lead the way in addressing the Fund’s aims within and across regions and UK nations according to scale.
We are keen to support projects that work with and engage local communities, that ensure diverse perspectives are represented in collecting and describing collections, that help preserve and make screen heritage collections more accessible and better understood, and that help ensure that the screen heritage collections of the future have no gap in the record of today.
Project awards support organisations to deliver discrete initiatives that are time-limited; have defined benefits for under-served communities and audiences; and have specific outputs. These could include screening or community engagement events; additions or improvements to curatorial/interpretative materials around an identified part of a collection; co-curation or cataloguing projects with under-represented communities that expands the diversity of collections; or a target for number of items accessioned to a collection through work with a specific community. These are examples and we can consider a wide range of types of projects, providing they meet the aims and criteria within our guidelines.
2. Delivering against our National Lottery Strategy
We aim to enable a thriving screen heritage sector and unlock the UK’s screen heritage for education and enjoyment to ensure everyone can experience a great range of screen culture. All Projects supported by the BFI National Lottery Screen Heritage Fund must deliver against objective 1 and at least one other of the following objectives of the BFI’s National Lottery strategy:
Objective 1: (Mandatory for project awards)
Experiencing screen culture – everyone can experience a great range of screen culture
Objective 1 outcomes:
- People across the UK can access a wider choice of film and the moving image including stories that reflect their lives
- Funding helps to tackle social, economic, and geographic barriers for screen audiences in new and effective ways
- More people can engage with heritage collections that better reflect the diversity of the UK
Objective 3:
A skilled and representative workforce – The UK screen sector workforce is skilled and reflects the population
Objective 3 outcomes:
- Workforce retention is improved by building inclusive, flexible and supportive workplaces
- Vital skills for the sector that cannot be delivered by the commercial market are developed
Objective 4:
Success in a changing landscape – independents and cultural organisations can adapt and thrive in a changing landscape
Objective 4 outcomes:
- Better support available for small and medium-sized enterprises and independents to develop their businesses
- Screen organisations have significantly reduced their carbon footprint
Key Performance Indicators
The BFI will measure the success of the Fund’s three strands (Resilience, Project and Skills funding) using the following Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):
UK-wide
- Number of in-person engagements with funded activity (e.g. screenings, community or outreach). Target: 300,000
- Number of online engagements with funded activity. Fund Target: 3 million
- Percentage of in-person engagements outside of London and outside 10 mile radius of archive base. Fund Target: 70%
Accessibility
- Accessible screenings, events or online engagements (subtitled, audio described, hard of hearing, relaxed screenings – dementia, autism/neuro-diverse/family friendly). Fund Target: 20%
- Percentage of projects available online. Fund Target: 30%
Environment
- Successful organisational applicants will need to ensure they have an effective plan for collecting the above data. The BFI will work with funded organisations to agree a plan for measuring the longer-term impacts of this Fund.
Three principles of our funding
In addition, all National Lottery awards must deliver against our three principles for National Lottery funding:
Equity, diversity and inclusion
We champion everyday inclusion at the BFI. A clearly defined and communicated set of Inclusion Targets gives us, our partners and the wider industry ambitious goals for a more diverse screen sector and representative audiences. The activity of this Fund will contribute towards achieving the BFI’s Inclusion Targets, which are:
- Disability (including those identifying as D/deaf or neurodiverse and those with a longstanding physical or mental diagnosis) 18%
- Black and Global Majority (London) 40%
- Black and Global Majority (outside London) 30%
- Gender (50-50 balance of male and female identifying within the gender binary) 50%
- Sexual identity — those identifying as LGB+ 10%
- Working class background 39%
We are committed to working with our National Lottery award recipients to meet ambitious targets. These targets will apply to the public beneficiaries of Project funding, meaning the audiences who benefit from the activity supported. The targets are cumulative across the activity we support and we expect funded organisations to contribute to achieving them, rather than necessarily meet all of them by themselves. You will be asked in your application to provide the inclusion goals you will work to for your individual project.
BFI Diversity Standards
All of the activity supported by our funding is informed by the BFI Diversity Standards.
With reference to the BFI Diversity Standards for organisations, you will need to demonstrate how your proposal meaningfully tackles under-representation in relation to disability, gender, race, age, sexual orientation and socio-economic status, while also considering the interactions of these identities and any other barriers to opportunity. If successful, you will need to report, following the conclusion of your project, evaluating how you have delivered against the aims of the Diversity Standards in practice.
Applicants whose projects create digital outputs should ensure that the outputs are accessible for all, including following best practice for disability access requirements and, where online, are available to view free of charge.
UK-wide
The BFI funds activity throughout the UK. This includes national, regional and local provision to ensure that communities throughout the UK feel the benefit of the screen industries and culture. You’ll need to tell us where your proposed activity will be delivered and how this will support the BFI’s UK-wide principle.
Applicants are encouraged to make use of partnership working to achieve their aims. This may include collaborating pan-regionally, working with the membership network Film Archives UK, with the BFI National Archive, the film exhibition sector, schools and education partners, and with other film archives in their regions and UK wide.
Environmental sustainability
You’ll need to tell us how you will embed the principle of environmental sustainability throughout your project. This includes describing what you’re doing to reduce your negative impact (such as reducing carbon emissions or minimising single-use plastic) as well as what you’re doing to increase your positive impact.
We encourage knowledge exchange and collaboration across screen archives and with other organisations that leads to the reduction of carbon emissions and negative impacts on biodiversity, smarter working and shared initiatives that meet environmental sustainability principles.
3. Check if you’re eligible
Funding is available to support organisations that hold and operate a screen heritage collection and meet the parameters set out in this section. For the purposes of these guidelines, screen includes any moving image or audio-visual format but excludes paper or other static form, sound and/or music. Heritage means the preservation, conservation, cataloguing and making accessible that screen collection. The screen heritage activity may form the sole or a partial activity of an eligible organisation.
Your organisation must be a legally constituted organisation centrally managed in the UK:
- Charity or trust registered with the Charity Commission (including UK universities and colleges)
- Limited Liability Company registered at Companies House
- Community Interest Company registered at Companies House
- Combined or local authority or statutory body
- and must operate an archive, collection network or similar whose remit is to collect, preserve and/or make screen collections freely accessible to the general public (that is it must operate on a not-for profit basis).
Individuals cannot apply. Organisations that hold screen collections but that are primarily engaged in the distribution and/or exhibition of that screen content for profit are also ineligible.
All projects need to be completed by 31 March 2026.
You are able to make multiple applications for Projects funding, and we recognise that sometimes elements of activity may need to overlap. You can therefore submit separate applications for elements of activity that overlap, providing you can demonstrate you have the capacity to deliver both projects at the same time. This means describing the staffing and other necessary resources you will have in place across the projects.
Please contact us if you’re unsure whether your organisation is eligible for this Fund: screenheritagefund@bfi.org.uk
4. What you can use the funding for
You can apply for between £10,000 and £80,000.
Types of eligible activity for project awards include:
- Expanding audience access to UK screen heritage collections, widening reach and engagement with a clear focus on underserved and underrepresented communities and audience
- Developing and implementing plans to address gaps in collections with a clear focus on ensuring collections better represent the diversity of communities across the UK
- Working with local communities to identify new collecting opportunities that address some of those gaps
- Ensuring that these collections are catalogued, curated and better understood through working with source communities, including during collecting and interpretation of the collections
- Ensuring those collections are safely preserved, curated and accessible
- Addressing the shared national challenge focused on collecting contemporary screen works including working on digital preservation workflows and systems, and finding solutions for collecting digital materials
- Ensuring that learning from the project is made widely accessible and helps the screen heritage sector thrive through a strong commitment to knowledge sharing and information exchange
- Working with formal and informal learning partners to improve understanding and enjoyment of screen heritage
Eligible costs
Eligible costs include, but are not limited to:
- Project development and delivery
- Staff costs and overheads required for direct project delivery. You’ll need to demonstrate that these costs cannot be covered by other sources of funding and do not cover the day to day running of your organisation; and are required in addition to any BFI Screen Heritage Fund Resilience award you might have been awarded in 2023
- Access and audience engagement activity
- Marketing and promotion of the project activities
- Collections care, where this is clearly linked to the Fund’s objectives
- Curation and collections development where these support delivery of audience-facing projects that expand diversity and reach
- Partnership development
- Community engagement and co-curation activities
- Rights clearance for activities that improve accessibility to collections and where access will be free to the public
- Limited digitisation where that work supports project delivery, access or diversifying collections
- Surveying public beneficiaries of the Fund e.g. attendees at screenings or users of online resources funded through your award
Costs ineligible for Project awards
Examples:
- Costs relating to an extension of ongoing work
- Capital (building project) expenditure
- Equipment expenditure that exceeds 8% of the amount requested from BFI
- Filmmaking projects and/or workshops, other film production training or development
- Activity that is already specifically supported by another external source of funding or by other BFI funding
- Costs incurred prior to an offer of funding from BFI
- Projects whose collections focus is on material already commercially available
- Projects on screen heritage that does not have strong British cultural or historic links, or strong cultural or historic links to local communities in the UK. We use British in this context to include the UK’s colonial histories
- Projects where direct income generation is a primary or dominant activity
- Projects which could indirectly fund a commercial body
- Promotional or other activities (e.g. printed brochures, tote bags, merchandise) which do not support environmental sustainability
This list is not exhaustive, and we may identify other cost types within your budget that are ineligible for support.
This Fund is not intended to substitute or replace existing funding or income that would otherwise be available, or to fund activity at the same scale that can go ahead without an award. National Lottery funds can only be awarded to applicants who demonstrate need and a clear public benefit from the activity being funded.
BFI National Lottery Funding is project-based, time-limited funding, and as such, there should be no expectation of ongoing support beyond the term of any awards made.
Please note, if you are registered for VAT, your figures should not include VAT that you can claim back. If you are not registered for VAT, or you are registered for VAT but cannot fully recover the VAT you incur on costs, your figures should include irrecoverable VAT. Grants we make are ‘outside the scope’ of VAT and should be listed in your accounts as a grant and not, for example, as a fee for any services supplied to the BFI. You should get financial advice from your own accountant or the relevant tax office.
Partnership funding
You do not have to raise additional finance for your project, if you can make it with the amount of funding you are requesting from the BFI. However, partnership contributions (cash or in-kind) are a helpful indication that there is genuine support for your project from your community, stakeholders and other partners.
If you are aiming to raise partnership funding, it does not have to be secured at the point of application. Contributions can be from your own organisation or third parties but not from other BFI National Lottery funds.
5. How to apply
The BFI Screen Heritage Fund is open year-round, and applications are accepted on a rolling basis. Applications are assessed as they are submitted. The sooner you apply, the sooner we can process your application.
You can choose to either send us an Expression of Interest (EOI) first, which we will provide feedback on, or to complete a full application.
We will confirm the receipt of EOIs within two working days and aim to review them within 10 working days. If your EOI indicates that your project is eligible for funding and you wish to proceed, you will then be required to complete a full application.
We’ll complete an initial review of full applications and request any additional information we need within four weeks.
We aim to take a decision within 12 weeks of your receiving your application. If we need additional information from you, it may take us longer to reach a decision on your application.
Completing your application
As part of the rollout for the BFI’s Screen Culture 2033 strategy, the applications to the BFI Screen Heritage Fund are now hosted on our new system, which is separate from our previous system.
You will need to create a new BFI applicant account to access and complete application forms under the new strategy: create an account to make your application online.
You can save your application and return to it later. If you intend to apply for one or more Project or Skills awards, you need to complete an application for each award separately.
You can view a PDF preview of the Expression of Interest (EOI) and application form below.
Information you need to provide
The application form will ask you for the following information:
Applicant information
A description of your screen heritage collection and activity to confirm your eligibility for funding.
Your proposal
An overview of your project activity describing:
- The activity itself – what it comprises, the timeline, and the resources and infrastructure you have in place to enable successful delivery. The specific challenges or opportunities that you want to address via your project
- How the project will address these and the difference you believe you will make
- The target audience(s) you will be focusing on
- Any resources your activity will develop
- Description of partnerships and collaborations, if applicable, including, where relevant, whether you have consulted the BFI National Archive
- For applications which include work on collections development, how the collections work will identify and address gaps in representation
- How you are addressing environmental sustainability and ecological impact as part of the activity, identifying the specific actions you will take
- Your plans for monitoring and evaluation
- How the proposal supports equity, diversity and inclusion, including how your organisation and/or project will reflect the diversity of cultures, lived experiences and perspectives of your target communities or audiences
- Your response to the BFI Diversity Standards
- How your proposal will address BFI National Lottery Funding Plan objective 1, and any secondary benefits in addressing objectives 3 and 4
Finance and deliverables
- Your total project budget amount, and the amount you are requesting from the BFI
- If applicable, a description of your partnership funding and its status — this can include sponsorship, grants, and projected income
- A statement as to why the costs applied for cannot be covered from other sources; why National Lottery funding is needed and what difference it will make
- Your ‘deliverables’ – the specific activity you will deliver using the funding. A description of the risks you foresee relating to your activity and how you will mitigate these
- A plan for knowledge exchange with peers in the screen heritage sector
Attachments
You will need to attach the following documents to your application:
- Project budget using template provided
- KPIs using template provided – the measures by which you will know whether the activity has successfully achieved its aims
- Your last set of independently certified / audited accounts
- if more than 12 months has passed since the year-end covered in your certified accounts, please additionally provide draft accounts for the intervening auditable period as approved by your Board (including both income and expenditure reporting and a balance sheet)
Download the Project award budget and KPI targets template
Equality monitoring
You’ll need to complete a mandatory equality monitoring form along with your application. The form asks for demographic information on your staff. Please complete it for your organisation only, not the staff of any parent organisation that you sit within and who do not work directly on archive activity. Equality Monitoring form responses are anonymous and confidential and aren’t used in the assessment process.
6. What happens after you apply?
How your application is assessed
When assessing your application, we consider:
Strategic aims
- To what extent does the application make a strong contribution to addressing the:
- Aims for the type of funding you are seeking, as articulated in the Overview; and
- Delivering against our National Lottery Strategy
- How clear are the goals, challenges and opportunities the proposal seeks to address
- How clear is the articulation of the difference the proposal will make
Public and cultural value
- To what extent does the proposal:
- Demonstrate cultural ambition
- Demonstrate partnership, collaboration and knowledge sharing
- Show a strong commitment to improving accessibility and to diversity and inclusion
- Demonstrate an audience-facing approach
- Have strong potential benefits for local and regional communities and/or the wider UK population, especially outside London
Strength and quality of the delivery and management plans
- To what extent does the proposal demonstrate:
- That the proposed activity is strategic, robust and logistically viable
- That applicants and any partners have the relevant skills, time and expertise to deliver and achieve a successful outcome
- That risks and mitigation plans are in place
- That there are clear plans for monitoring and evaluation
- Long-term impact
- What the legacy or outcome of the activity is likely to be, without further support from the BFI National Lottery
- The environmental impact of the activity
- To what extent will any audience development outcomes of the project last beyond its delivery period
- Finances and resources
- To what extent do applicants show:
- That their organisation is financially secure
- A feasible budget that covers the necessary expenditure
- That the activity represents good value for money
- Evidence of partnership working
- Clarity as to what BFI National Lottery funding will be used for and why it is needed. We can only support activity that genuinely requires public funding to take place
We also consider how you have managed any previous BFI awards and where your activity will take place, as we aim to make awards across the UK.
We may share parts of your application with other BFI teams or external consultants to help us assess it.
How we prioritise applications
We get a lot of applications and cannot support them all. We prioritise proposals that:
- Clearly address the National Lottery Strategy objectives and outcomes
- Are closest to the Fund’s aims as articulated in the Overview
- Are likely to have the biggest impact on the screen heritage sector
- Offer value for money
- Try new approaches or have the potential to develop practice that may benefit the wider sector
- Include clear plans and targets for reaching audiences from underrepresented backgrounds
Assessment
Applications will be reviewed by an assessment panel that will include the BFI Screen Heritage Fund team and invited experts external to the BFI.
Lottery Finance Committee Consideration
Following assessment of each application, we will make funding recommendations to the BFI Lottery Finance Committee. This is the final stage of the funding decision process.
We undertake due diligence assessments of the applications we are recommending to our decision-making committee for funding. As part of this, before submitting an application to the committee, we will request the bank details of the lead applicant.
We will also request the personal address and date of birth of the CEO or Managing Director of the organisation applying. Our request for this information is not an indication or confirmation of funding and you will be informed separately of the funding decision on your application. We will use this data to run an identity check. Please note that this is not a credit check and will not affect the ability of the CEO or Managing Director to receive credit from other organisations. We will be unable to share your application with our decision-making committee until we have received your completed form.
We will inform you in writing of the decision on your application.
7. Getting a decision
If you’re successful
- You will receive a written offer of funding
- You will need to sign the offer of funding and return it to the BFI within 14 days
Your offer of funding will set out details of how you’ll receive the funding, how to use it and how we expect you to report to us.
If you’re unsuccessful
We may have turned down your application because we determined that the proposal:
- Did not address the National Lottery Strategy objectives and outcomes
- Did not address the Fund’s aims as articulated in the Overview
- Did not demonstrate a strong enough commitment to one or more of the following principles: equity, diversity and inclusion; UK-wide; environmental sustainability
- Was not yet developed enough
- Did not demonstrate sufficient need for National Lottery support and should be financed by other means
- Did not sufficiently address the BFI Diversity Standards
- Did not demonstrate enough relevant experience
We will keep the data and supporting materials you sent to us in line with our records retention policy.
Feedback
You will receive feedback on your EOI if you choose to complete it. We will do our best to offer feedback to all unsuccessful applicants, but as a small team we can’t guarantee it.
We always welcome your feedback on the application process and how we might improve it.
8. Conditions of funding
If you are offered an award from us, in addition to the General Conditions of National Lottery Funding for successful applicants, the following conditions will apply to your award:
- You will be required to complete interim and final reports on your funded project progress (the frequency of which will be determined by the duration of the funded activity), including a narrative report, cost report and KPI reporting and to meet with us to review the progress of your activity if requested
- You will be advised to discuss your plans for any activity that develops digital preservation methodology with the BFI National Archive to ensure cross-sector uniformity of standards are applied
- You will need to adopt safeguarding provisions for protecting children and vulnerable adults where appropriate
- You will be required to work with Julie’s Bicycle to assess the environmental impact of your funded activity, including calculating its carbon footprint. We will offer you guidance and resources on how to deliver your activity sustainably
- Awardees delivering activity that involves public-facing content will also have the support of Julie’s Bicycle to identify or develop content, where relevant, addressing themes that enable audiences to understand and engage with the climate and ecological crisis
- Digital outputs created and made accessible online using funds awarded should be available within the UK to the public, at no cost to them, for a period of at least ten years