How funders can impact our democracy: Five learnings from the 2024 General Election

Thanks to the collaborative effort of our grantees, funders and partners, the UK Democracy Fund enabled an estimated 750,000 voter registrations ahead of the 2024 UK General Election. We focused on those who are historically less likely to vote – young people, those from racialised and minoritised ethnicities, migrants, renters and those living on low incomes. We’re incredibly proud of delivering this against the context of long term trends of low turnout, low levels of trust, the introduction of Voter ID and the widely held view that the outcome of the election was a foregone conclusion.

Through a broad portfolio of evidence-led grant making, Fund grantees:

-       piloted new models of community engagement for Black voters through canteens and skating groups;

-       worked through schools, colleges and universities;

-       engaged young people online through youth-led campaigns;

-       organised in migrant communities;

-       and worked through churches, mosques and trusted brands.

We learned a lot, much of it shared here in our evaluation. But here are some key takeaways:

1)    Charitable funding is effective in enabling voter participation

The Fund was set up in 2019 in response to the lack of charitable funding for democracy in the UK. As a pooled fund with a range of charitable funders, the Fund has demonstrated how well charitable funding can be used to promote democratic equality, in line with the charitable purpose of, “the advancement of citizenship or community development.” Across our portfolio of grants, campaigns were well delivered, non-partisan and led to huge impact.

2)    Longer-term funding is essential

It will not surprise any funder to hear that grantees consistently told us that they needed long-term funding to do this work well. In election-related work particularly, this is a crucial challenge for the sector. Funding is often available only around the crunch points of elections, making it hard for organisations to retain staff and expertise. Crucially, short term campaigns are also much less effective in dealing with long term mistrust which is often a root cause for democratic disengagement.

On the other hand, many grantees found it hard to mobilise partners or voters without the urgency of an election around the corner. Resolving this challenge needs more thought, but grantees’ approaches have included developing their own “moments” such as My Life My Say’s National Voter Registration Day, which they run annually. Of course, in the UK there are elections every year, and local elections suffer even lower levels of turnout than Westminster elections. So there is always work worth doing.

 3) Intermediaries and specialist support can be extremely effective

Since 2019 the Fund has developed considerable expertise in funding democratic engagement, through academic research, evaluations and pilot campaigns. We know what is likely to work, what is worth testing, and what is less likely to be effective. But when designing a broad portfolio of interventions, expert input is needed.

- Wanting to further test the impact of large-scale digital campaigns for registering young voters, we sought digital campaigns expertise to bolster what the Fund had already learned. This was essential in allowing us to accurately assess the detail of technically detailed campaign proposals. Our consultant, Joshua Carrington, was able to synthesise the learning from the excellent campaigns we funded, creating a guide for the sector for future elections.

- Aiming to generate more insight into what works to engage the UK’s low-voting Black communities, our evidence pointed us in the direction of working through trusted community leaders. We commissioned Local Champions CIC to help us, utilising their expertise working with grassroots organisations and combining it with our voter engagement expertise. They helped identify organisations who could play a valuable role, and supported them through the grant application process and throughout their campaigns. Finally, they pulled together learnings from across the campaigns, providing a rich set of insights from three very different sets of leaders.