Help in kind
Getting help in kind is sometimes the most valuable resource of all for projects. Help-in-kind is the provision of goods or services for which you would normally have to pay but which the project is being offered for free.
For instance your project may need some building materials or paint, sports equipment or tools that you can persuade a shop of manufacturer to provide for free. If this is the case you should recognise this in the budget; the cost of purchasing these goods should be recorded on the expenditure side of the budget and also on the income side of the budget. This means that if you have to show "matched funding" to be eligible for a grant this is perfectly legitimate.
The same is true of services, particularly professional services. You may need the support of an architect, a solicitor, an auditor, etc. It may be possible to get these services free of charge and if you do you should record the "potential" cost as an expenditure and as an income in your budget.
Locally one organisation that specialises in trying to secure the services of professionals to help local charities and community groups in Leicestershire Cares through a scheme called Pro Help.
Leicestershire ProHelp is a network of professional firms offering free professional advice and strategic support for one-off projects for the voluntary and community sector. Member firms include solicitors, marketing consultants, website and graphic designers, accountants, architects, IT consultants, and surveyors who commit to offering support free of charge each year on a range of projects.
For more information please contact Leicestershire ProHelp by e-mail or by telephone on 0116 275 6490, or download case studies of groups who have benefitted from ProHelp below;
case_study_-_hugglescote_community_centre.doc
case_study_-_menphys_annual_walk.doc
Volunteers are also a form of help-in-kind. That is not often how we think of volunteers but in reality because they provide their time free and if they did not provide their time free you would have to pay someone to undertake the task, it is help in kind. In some funding schemes you are able to include this volunteering time as help-in- kind and use it as matched funding for a bid. There are not many cases where this is true but where it is this can be a great help.
Planning for volunteers and putting a "cost" to it can also help to establish with a funder that your project provides fantastic value for money so it is worth calculating its value. There is no common figure used for showing the value of this help-in-kind but a rule of thumb may be to allocate £45 per day as the "nominal cost". Again these "costs" can be put in both the expenditure and income sides of your budget.
