Published with Options 4 Change's written permission
Three risks caught before Options 4 Change submitted
Your own papers would get the same read. Options 4 Change (registered charity 1162000) sent us what they had already written. Three risks came back before any of it was submitted. Here is each one, and how you check it with them.
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Who are they, and what did they buy?
Options 4 Change (registered charity 1162000) has been delivering since 2005. It is a practice education site for five universities, which means universities place students with it for training. They first worked with us on several applications and then kept us on a monthly retainer.
In their words
"Thank you for turning this around, the application is strong. I can see the thinking behind building the whole case around the technology piece."
Options 4 Change, 27 July 2026.
What did reading their papers catch?
Theo Ilori reads every enquiry, and he answers for every document that leaves here.
An £822 gap inside one application
The narrative in their Foux Foundation application asked for £41,412, and their own budget table in the same document totalled £40,590. It was caught by adding every column up again, independently of the draft, which is the first thing a funder's finance reviewer does.
An overheads line worth about £2,500
The overheads line is where the core costs of running the charity get into the bid. Theirs was set at 3.7 per cent of a £40,590 budget, and on this application the difference was around £2,500, money they were entitled to ask for and had left out.
What travelled with the document
A previous application they sent us for context had a funder portal login printed inside it. They were told the moment it was found.
Why did we tell them to ask for less?
Because their intended ask would have read as a risk before a word of the case was read. The funder's giving record showed grants in 2023 ranging from £10,000 to £40,114, against total annual giving of roughly £190,000 to £210,000. What Options 4 Change were about to ask for was larger than any single grant in that record, and near a fifth of everything the Foux Foundation gives away in a year.
So the recommendation was to ask for less, set out as options with the reasoning for each and the one we would choose. The decision stayed with them, and so did six other questions that went back with the document, because they were theirs to answer.
Who pressed submit
Options 4 Change did, every time, because we hold none of their portal logins and have never dealt with a funder as them, so what the funder read was their application, in their name, checked before it went.
Can I check this with them?
Yes. They are still on a monthly retainer, and they have agreed to take reference calls, so ask when you enquire.
The same read of your papers is where a bid review starts, and that page carries both prices.
Get the same read on your bid
The same read starts with your papers, your deadline and whatever is drafted.