Funding in Aotearoa - what does the data tell us?

Fundsorter has conducted the first comprehensive analysis of contestable grant funding available in New Zealand.

We analysed almost 2,000 funding opportunities across 37 broad categories. Below is a census of all of the contestable funding opportunities in New Zealand - descriptive data that shows what funds are explicitly prioritising. 

These insights can help funders and community organisations see where gaps exist. Up until now, very little public data has been available on what funding is available in New Zealand, and without good data, we can’t make good decisions. In the future we hope to share additional data: what communities say they most need funding for (derived from user queries in our system), versus where grant dollars actually end up (using public and voluntary reporting). Over time, we will be able to see trends in the data and this will help to highlight mismatches between grassroots need, funder intent, and funding delivered – guiding strategy, policy and advocacy.

Below you can look both nationwide data, and data on each of the 16 regions. When looking at regions you will see a +/- percentage change as compared to national data. This data is live and updates as we update our database.

Read more insights, analysis and perspectives on some of the most and least prioritised funding categories over on our blog.

Technical notes on this data

These stats relate to contestable grant funding opportunities available to New Zealand groups seeking grants. This data does not measure dollar amounts of funding available or granted, only the number of grant opportunities. It doesn’t include non-public funding opportunities (e.g. proactive grantmakers).

Grantmaking organisations may have multiple funds with different focus areas. International funding available to kiwi groups is also included (though it’s a minority). The largest category, “all”, indicates a very broad fund that may grant in any of the categories (but isn’t explicitly focused). Note that some funding opportunities have more than one priority or focus, and so are counted in multiple categories, which means that percentages do not sum to 100%. Therefore, if a category here is listed at 10%, you can say that 10% of funding opportunities available in NZ explicitly target funding to that category, but not that 10% of all NZ funders target it, or that 90% of funds exclude it. 

Selecting a region shows statistics for funding available to projects working within that region (e.g. the Wellington region includes Porirua, Lower Hutt etc). Regional data does not include national opportunities that may fund into that area. Regional data may have some inaccuracies, depending on how funders describe their focus areas.

While International Development & Humanitarian Aid is a category here, it is not a focus for Fundsorter (which is aimed at groups working in NZ), and therefore it may be under-represented in our data. 

There may be some inconsistencies with the West Coast Region data - we are working to clean this up at the moment.