Apply for a Research and Innovation Grant

About Research and Innovation Grants

Programme context

Our approach to our leadership role is a collaborative one: supporting partnerships and working to encourage a sustainable and innovative sector.

We want to prepare the archives sector for the future, in an uncertain world. We will invest in the skills of the archives sector workforce; in research, to lead innovation in technology and archival practice; and in engagement, to connect archives with changing societies in places across England and Wales.

In particular, we want to provide funding that will confront the challenges of today: preserving and sharing the digital record, reducing our environmental impact and adapting to climate change, and helping the archives sector become more diverse, equitable and inclusive.

To create opportunities for research, innovation and transformative projects in the archive sector, The National Archives is launching a research and innovation grant programme, building on the success of our Archives Testbed grant programme (2019-2022).

Research and Innovation Grants will offer grants for organisations to conduct research, innovate and create transformative projects that will contribute to building a sustainable and innovative archives sector.

We would like to encourage archives to formulate ideas based on their own skills and experience, with a focus on the three challenge areas of digital transformation, environmental sustainability and inclusive practice. The following may be ways to address these challenges, when thinking of topics for an application:

• Archives may have identified a problem or research question in their practice, that they have an idea about how to solve
• Archives may want to explore new technologies, devices or products, in their archives service
• Archives may wish to connect with others, to increase their own capacity for research and innovation.

We encourage archives to be creative and imaginative in identifying an idea that they wish to develop. The idea could be simple or radical – but it should have the potential to bring about positive change in the archive organisation and beyond.

We anticipate that the Research and Innovation Grants may include cohort workshops, with other grantees, The National Archives and funders. The aim of these workshops will be to connect grantees with researchers at The National Archives, broker contact with research funders, and provide training in research and innovation skills.

Funded Research and Innovation Grants

Find out more about projects that have been awarded Research and Innovation Grants.

How to apply

Eligibility

Research and Innovation Grants are open to archivists and heritage professionals working with archival collections in England or Wales. We cannot fund organisations based in Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man or whose collections are held outside of the United Kingdom.

The programme is open to all public sector bodies, not-for-profit organisations including registered charities, and for-profit organisations including business archives. Funding is not available to private individuals.

The records can be in analogue or digital formats and can be inside or outside of the custody of the records creator or a recognised collecting archive institution.

We use the definition of an archive collection as given within the Archive Service Accreditation Scheme:

The organisation must employ or have access to professional support from an archivist or similarly qualified professional.

There is no restriction on past applicants applying, however repeat applications are no more likely to receive funding, and you are strongly encouraged to speak to The National Archives’ Grants and Funding team before submitting a second application for the same project. There are no restrictions on institutions submitting an application for a different project.

Where appropriate, archives are encouraged to propose partnership projects and consortium applications are particularly welcome in this programme.

What the programme can fund

Funded activity may include, but is not limited to:

• Seed funding for early-stage, exploratory research
• Pilot projects
• Commissioning research from an external provider
• ‘Spin-off’ research that emerges from and builds on other projects
• Travel and subsistence for research trips, e.g. to other collections
• Dissemination and publishing, including events and publication fees

The programme cannot fund:

• Overheads, full cost recovery or management fees
• Collections acquisition
• Costs incurred prior to the date of any award offer from us
• The core work of an archive service

The grant may not be used for the following purposes: payments that support activity intended to influence Parliament, Government or political parties, or attempting to influence the awarding or renewal of contracts and grants, or attempting to influence legislative or regulatory action.

Accessibility and reasonable adjustments

We welcome and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds and are committed to making our application process accessible to everyone. This includes providing support, in the form of reasonable adjustments, for people who have a disability or a long-term condition and face barriers applying to us.

You must contact us as early as possible in the application process.

Application deadlines

The Research and Innovation programme is currently open for applications and will close at 17:00 on 17 October 2026.

Plan your application

We ask that all applications be submitted via our online form. You can download a Word document version of the form to help you prepare.

Submit your application

Assessment criteria

Scoring system

Each application will be scored numerically against a set of criteria, according to the following scale:

Further information on each criterion is given below. This information is not intended to be exhaustive: an outstanding answer may not cover all of the points mentioned, and/or may cover other points as appropriate to the applicant and their project.

However, the information below should assist applicants in writing successful proposals, and will be provided to each panellist to guide their assessment.

The criteria information provided below is not intended to be exhaustive: an outstanding answer may not cover all of the points mentioned, and/or may cover other points as appropriate to the applicant and their project.

1. Significance

The National Archives is committed to supporting the preservation and use of significant archival collections within the United Kingdom. You should aim to outline why your collection is important, unique and of clear value to your audiences, today and in the future.

Significance may be different for different audiences that engage with a collection, and it may be helpful to consider who they are. An academic may have a different goal, when engaging with a collection, than a family historian or community representative.

The prompts below may help you to think about why and how your collection is significant, but you do not need to cover all of them – you should focus your answer on your collection’s areas of strength:

1. Provenance: Who created, collected and has used the collection.
2. Rarity: Whether the collection is unique or unusual, and if it is a particularly fine example of a collection of its type.
3. Condition and Completeness: Whether the collection is intact and in good condition, and if its condition can tell us anything about its history, ownership or use.
4. Historical, Cultural or Scientific Meaning: How the collection tells the story of particular people, groups, organisations, events, places, beliefs, or practices; whether it has special historic or cultural interest for an audience, region or community; whether and how it could be used for academic research; and whether it enriches or fills in gaps in other collections, at your organisation or elsewhere.
5. Sensory and Emotional Impact: Whether the collection has strong visual/sensory impact, or evokes a strong personal or cultural response; and whether the language, format, technique, design or style reflect outstanding creativity or innovation.
6. Marketing and Exploitability: Whether the collection could support marketing, income generation or profile-raising for your organisation or community.

Please ensure that the focus of your response is on the collection that you are intending to work with. The significance of the wider collections in your archive can be important, but your main focus should be on the collection that you are applying for.

2. Need

Tell us why your project is needed, and why it is needed now.

You might want to tell us about a particular problem or challenge which you are seeking to address. This might be (for Records at Risk grants), an immediate issue, such as a physical or organisational threat to a collection: what is the collection’s condition, and is it at risk from mould, pests, damage or obsolescence? What is its environment, for physical or digital storage? Is the organisation holding the collection at risk, from closure or liquidation?

Or it may be a longer-term problem, such as a longer-term issue with your collection or archive service, which can only be addressed by an investment in skills, outside expertise, equipment or staff time. Have you identified (for Skills Bursaries) a particular skills gap, such as in digital transformation, environmental sustainability, or equity, diversity and inclusion – or (for Resilience Grants), a weaker area on the Archives Service Resilience Indicator?

You may also want to capitalise on particular opportunities: whether there are local strategies or wider initiatives which make the project timely, or whether there is other funding or partnerships which are immediately available. What will happen if you do not get a grant from us?

It’s important to outline why the grant provides a solution or partial solution to the challenge, and why it is important for the investment to occur now. It may be helpful to include evidence supporting this answer: for example, you could include photographs or supporting letters.

Every archive service will have different needs, both short-term and long-term: use this response to tell us what they are.

3. Impact

We define impact as “the demonstrable contribution that a project makes.” Tell us why your project is going to change things: for you, for your archive service, for your users and audiences, for the archives sector, or for society. We want to understand what difference your proposal will make, and what change will result from the project, and for whom.

Ask yourself ‘what will happen?’ What are the short-term, medium-term and long-term changes that the project will bring about, and who will be affected? Is the change physical (new resources, materials or capital), procedural, or cultural?

Impact should scale according to the size of the grant being provided: for smaller grants, impact may be personal (new skills or learning), or institutional (such as improved ways of working within your archive service). For larger grants, strong applications will evidence impact beyond their own organisation. Please read the question carefully, to ensure that you are focusing your answer on the relevant areas of focus.

It is also important to consider the impact that your project will have on users of your archive. The users of archives can be diverse, with audiences having different motivations and needs from your service. You are best placed to understand who your audiences are, and who they could be: it might be helpful to explain the change you want to bring about, in how existing users interact with your service and collections, and/or in how you reach new audiences.

You may wish to outline how you intend to engage with audiences outside of your institution: do you have plans or partnerships in place, to engage with (for example) your local community, researchers, schools or higher education?

It is important to consider how the grant will have an impact beyond its own duration, and create a sustainable legacy of change: is this project part of a longer-term strategic plan, and how does it align with other activities or the future direction of the organisation?

Impact can take many different forms, and every project will have a different response: but a strong answer will always clearly outline what outcomes it is seeking to create, and how it plans to engage with beneficiaries and audiences, inside and outside of the archive service which is applying.

4. Delivery and management

When giving a grant, we need to be confident that it is possible to deliver every project that we fund, within the organisation and with the team you have available. Use this question to fully explain how you intend to carry out the project’s activities, spend its budget and achieve its delivery milestones.

We would like to understand in detail what you are proposing to do, who will deliver the project and what skills they have. Please tell us who has overall responsibility for the project, and who else is involved. Will you be working with a professional archivist? What types of posts do you need, and how are they paid? (You may wish to refer to the Archives and Records Association (ARA) salary recommendations). Are new staff being hired, or are you using existing staff; if so, how are their existing responsibilities being covered? Are you using volunteers, and how will they be managed and supported?

Please provide a rationale for any non-staff expenditure that you need to deliver your project, and how you plan to procure any resources you need, if you don’t have access to them already.

If your project involves multiple institutions, tell us how the relationship between the partners will be managed and governed, and how work will be divided and structured.

Tell us how you are going to manage your project, to ensure that it keeps on track – you may wish to attach a Gantt Chart or similar project planning tool, particularly for larger projects. In most grant programmes, we will ask you to outline at least three key milestones that need to be achieved to ensure your project’s success.

Finally, you may want to think about the risks that your project faces, and what mitigations you will be putting in place to address them.

Terms and conditions

Feedback and reapplication

The panel will score against the assessment criteria and provide feedback upon request. You will be given the opportunity to discuss your application with a member of The National Archives’ Grants and Funding team.

The National Archives’ decision regarding any application is final, and no appeal process is in place: it is the lead applicant’s responsibility to make sure that all of the information provided in the application is correct, their proposal meets the eligibility criteria, and all sections of the application are complete. Applications that are deemed ineligible will be excluded from consideration. Any points you wish to make should be made clearly and concisely in the application form.

The fund is designed to support urgent interventions, therefore if your application is unsuccessful, it will be unlikely to receive funding from any reapplication. However, the panel will endeavour to provide constructive feedback that enables positive solutions and clear next steps when requested. There are no restrictions on institutions submitting an application for a different project.

If you are awarded funding, The National Archives’ Grants and Funding team will contact you with a Grant Funding Agreement, which should be signed by an appropriate member of your organisation. For grants of a value lower then £20,000, 100% of the grant’s value will be paid to you up front, except in circumstances where The National Archives, in consultation with the grantee, deems that an alternative payment structure is necessary for the successful delivery of the funded activities. For grants of and over £20,000 in value, payments will usually be made in two instalments, at the start and end of your projects.

Grant conditions

All grantees will be required to comply with the Code of Conduct for Recipients of Government General Grants and all relevant legislation, as well as the monitoring and evaluation conditions outlined in previous sections. Further conditions may be outlined within the Grant Funding Agreement.

Reporting, evaluation and knowledge dissemination

Every applicant will be required to provide a project budget at application stage, using the costing template provided. Successful applicants must also provide a final project expenditure statement, based on actual expenditure. If final expenditure falls below the amount agreed in the Grant Funding Agreement, The National Archives may ask grantees to return any unspent funds at the end of the project. The National Archives will not cover the cost of any project spend above what has been agreed in the Grant Funding Agreement.

Alongside the final expenditure statement, all grantees will also be required to provide an end-of-project report, summarising key achievements against the activities outlined in the application. Some grantees may also be required to provide progress updates throughout the delivery of the project; this will be decided by on case-by-case basis at award stage, based on the complexity of the project proposed. All reporting requirements, including the timing and nature of reporting, will be made clear to successful applicants at award stage.

All grantees will be expected to take steps to address delivery issues or delays if they arise, and inform The National Archives as soon as possible, should an issue arise that poses a significant risk to the successful delivery of the funded activities within the agreed timescales. It is possible that The National Archives’ team may visit your project, during or after your grant (we will not visit applicants as part of the assessment process).

Grantees will also be required to demonstrate the benefits and key performance indicators (KPIs) that the competition is seeking to realise. Successful applicants will be required to provide evidence against these measures. The measures against which applicants will be required to report, and the reporting intervals, will be agreed at award stage. Whilst benefit & KPI reporting is compulsory for all applicants, performance against these indicators is for the purpose of measuring the impact of the funding programme only, and does not affect eligibility for the grant.

Our approach to monitoring and evaluation is informed by our vision: through our grant-making, we want to build evidence for investment in archives, celebrate grantees’ success, and advocate for the archives sector, while keeping our reporting requirements as flexible and accessible as possible.

Contact us

Should you have any questions about applying for a Research and Innovation Grant, including about eligibility and reasonable adjustments, please email the Grants and Funding team.