SiSo Grants Programme 2020

We’re pleased to announce that we are now able to offer grants of up to £2,000 to businesses in the digital, creative and technology sectors in Dorset thanks to continued funding from the European Regional Development Fund, which we’ve been pushing for over the past 9 months. These 25% match-funded grants are now available for local businesses.

It’s worth stressing that the grants, the match funding requirements and the eligibility criteria were all, unfortunately, set out and agreed in a pre-Covid-19 environment, so some of the restriction might not be as helpful as we’d like right now, but, it does mean that some funding is available to companies who can continue to invest, innovate and create new products at this time. They (and we) are tied to certain criteria in order to get this money out to local businesses.We will be reserving a portion of the total fund in the hope that it can support more businesses once this uncertain period is hopefully behind us.

The grants can provide a 25% contribution of £1,000 or £2,000, for any business spending a total of between £4,000 and £8,000.

The basic criteria:

• You MUST be a business based in Dorset
• You MUST NOT have received grant funding from either Silicon South or Dorset Growth Hub since 2017
• You MAY have received other support
• You MUST be able to spend the full grant total before the end of June 2020 (for this initial round of grants) – the grant will be reimbursed to you upon completion of all the project spend
• The full project budget MUST ONLY pay for external costs i.e – specialist equipment, consultancy fees etc. You CAN NOT spend any of the budget of PAYE staff
• You MUST provide bank statements and invoices as proof of all project-related spend prior to the grant being released to you
• You will need to fill in a few forms (sorry!) but please don’t apply if you aren’t happy to do this – we will help guide you through all of it!

This grants scheme is in partnership with Dorset Growth Hub – and full guidelines have been compiled here.

To apply for the grant, please fill in this form. If you have any questions prior to your application please email [email protected] to set up a phone call.