Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) are very heavily reliant on the European Funds – this is not a surprise. Indeed, the vast majority of NGOs across Europe (and beyond) draw their primary resources from diverse programmes, becoming heavily reliant on the calls for funding and their own resources, making the deadline season something akin to the hunger games, or a closed circle of survival in which the organisations must invest vast resources in order to rely on somewhat unpredictable rates that influence their operational capacity each year.
Staff members of such organisations are not compensated for the unsuccessful proposals. We, at Out of the Box International, have made a rough calculation on the drain of resources that are required to prepare a qualitative and competitive proposal, as reviewed in the 2021 article “European Money Falls From the Sky”. And, looking into the trends over the year of the success rate of the proposals, the drain on resources and operational capacity is quite clear.
To simplify: the majority of the organisations get funded only for the implementation of the projects that are already approved; they do not get paid to participate in new calls for proposals; however, in order to obtain the funding, they must apply for new projects with every deadline, which requires extensive effort and resources are required in order to prepare a competitive proposal. OTB quantifies these new developments starting from 10,000 EUR per project proposal, contributing 20-60 staff working days per proposal, involving people who research, develop partnerships, write, proofread, develop budgets and finally those who put the application together for successful submission. Sounds daunting? It is.
Furthermore, the fact of submission does not equal funding (or, in some cases, survival) in the first place. The evaluation procedure and timeline require a separate article, and then there are the success rates to consider.
Not all the calls for proposals publish results in a comparative way, so for the sake of clarity, we have taken a few representative samples from centralised calls for proposals we have participated in the very recent past. The data shown below has been taken from the official call updates and is a matter of public knowledge. In this case, data from 2022-2024 has been used with reference to programmes such as Creative Europe or Erasmus + Programmes and finally, information from the 3 calls from Interreg (in which the data for 2024 is based on factsheets published prior to the announcement of the results).
Creative Europe programme results for the call for international cooperation in the field of culture show an average success rate of 17% for the year 2024, with small-scale strand 1 being more successful than medium-scale strand 2 which barely reached a 12% success rate from the 354 applications submitted. Taking the minimum 10,000 EUR development cost for mid-scale, we can guesstimate the drain on resources of organisations developing the application to be minimum 312,000 EUR. What is interesting – the passing score for the application was 70/100 points; however, the actual passing grade was no lower than 90, showing many competitive proposals that, despite being above the threshold, missed out on the funding.
The cooperation call for European NGOs within the Erasmus + is less hefty due to the specific nature of the applicant eligible (European NGOs). The call is usually separated into Education and Youth Strands and is fairly recent (4th round having released an evaluation of the results over the summer). In this call, the Educational strand received 57 applications, out of which 12 were chosen for funding (21%), and the Youth Strand received 26 applications, from which 5 were funded. The results show a significant success rate drop, from respectively 42 and 36% from the previous year.
But what about organisations that come from beyond the member states or the candidates? Their options are even more limited, which makes the competition for the available resources a true battle. So far, OTB has only participated in one type of global call, the Erasmus+ Capacity Building in the fields of Higher Education and Youth, with mixed results.
Capacity Building in the field of Higher Education is, like Creative Europe, separated into strands: Small scale (Strand 1), Medium Scale (Strand 2) and Large Scale (Strand 3) available for governmental bodies such as ministries of countries. It is a rather muddled call that sees a lot of eligibility exclusions every year. In this call, the small-scale projects are the most successful (around 40% success rate), with Strand 3 averaging at 30, and medium scale at the very bottom with less than 10% success rate. For reference, the 2024 call received a total of 765 proposals, out of which 79 were awarded, which puts the financial drain at a guesstimate of 690,000 EUR, which is a staggering amount of money for applicant organisations. And the call is getting more and more competitive, with the number of applications rising from 620 in 2022 to 972 in 2024.
The programme’s Youth call presents a similar medium-scale result of around a 10% success rate with 367 submissions in 2024 and 37 approvals.
But what about the other funding opportunities? The question is complicated. For example, the Interreg Europe programme offers around 130 million EUR available per call, which usually happens once a year, with an average 53% success rate. And while the results for the 3rd call (2024) are not yet in, the factsheets show that, based on available funding and funding requested, around 50% of applications can expect to receive funding. However, these calls are very rarely available for the NGOs, and even if they are allowed to participate, they must take on a specific role, with a limit of 1 NGO per proposal, with certain geographical and operational restrictions.
In the end, the data shows some concerning trends. Organisations report unsatisfactory results in the recent evaluations; experienced organisations are facing probably the worst of recent years. The number of proposals for funding is increasing with each call, and the funding bar keeps getting raised. The time to be invested in minor details of the proposal design makes the development process even more pricey and time-consuming. In addition to this, the threat of AI written content remains, and the capacity of organisations to deliver qualitative results decreases as they are forced to reduce the planned costs of the proposals. But what of the newcomers, you may ask? After all, the commitment of the EU is to support newcomers in the field. However, in a world where you need money to make money, the newcomers struggle even more to scramble for resources. And as 2025 application deadlines approach, the organisations are gearing up for yet another rendition of the cycle once more repeated.