Case Study: Big Lottery Fund achieves targeted funding and reduces ineligible applications with Ordnance Survey postcode-mapping tools

Big Lottery Fund - Customer Case Study

The Big Lottery Fund faced a likely oversubscribed Reaching Communities buildings programme and needed a way to target grants to the most deprived and rural areas so that ineligible applicants would not waste time applying. Working with Ordnance Survey, the Fund used products such as Code-Point Open, Boundary-Line and MiniScale to combine deprivation data, ONS urban/rural classifiers and recent grant locations into a postcode-based eligibility checker on its website.

Ordnance Survey helped import and map lower super output area (LSOA) data, apply different deprivation cut-offs for urban, rural and town/village groups and generate a list of roughly 6,000 priority LSOAs (about 18% of England) and corresponding postcodes. The postcode checker has driven measurable impact: only 1.6% of applications have come from non-priority areas, applicants avoid 3–8 hours of wasted work, administrative burden and costs have fallen, and the approach is being rolled out to other programmes.

Big Lottery Fund

Miranda Collett

Head of Data Management