SmartyNews UK (March 2026)

March 2026

Hi there,

Here is your latest SmartyNews - a regular newsletter provided exclusively to active SmartyGrants users, through which we provide important system updates and policy notifications.

Important Update: Changes to Address Format

We’d like to inform you of an improvement to how addresses are captured within our forms, following recent customer feedback and further research. New address fields are now available.

What's changed?

Changes to our address fields are shown below in bold.

Address Line 1
Address Line 2
Town/Village is now Town/City
City/County is now County
Postcode
Country

New: Sub-premise field

We have also introduced a new optional field to capture sub-premise details (e.g. flat, apartment, level). These details are typically not validated by address lookup providers.

To improve address accuracy and validation (including latitude/longitude matching), applicants will be prompted to enter sub-premise information separately. The system will:

Detect when sub-premise details are entered in the single-line address search field and prompt users to move them to the additional field
Provide the field during manual address entry (via “Can’t find your address?”)

Impact on existing forms

To avoid disruption:

Existing forms with responses will remain unchanged
Existing forms without responses will not automatically update
New forms will automatically use the updated address format

If you would like to update an existing form (without responses), simply delete the current address field(s) and re-add them.

Reporting updates

The new sub-premise field will be available as a separate reporting field, and will also be included within the “full address” reporting option.

These changes are designed to make address entry more intuitive and improve the accuracy and usefulness of collected data.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact our support team at service@smartygrants.co.uk.

Welcome to our new users!

The SmartyGrants UK family is growing! A warm welcome to two of our new users, both of them fantastic place-based grantmakers:

We also are pleased to be working to onboard a number of local authorities - more details to come.

Our new UK users join a community of more than 850 grantmakers of all sizes and types across the globe who use SmartyGrants to support their mission - we're delighted to have you all on board.

The Goldilocks Zone: Standardising grants without breaking your organisation

In this webinar, SmartyGrants experts will walk through what effective grant standardisation looks like in the real world. Drawing on research, lived experience, and system design examples, we’ll cut through theory and focus on what actually works.

We’ll unpack the common traps grantmakers fall into, share practical design principles, and demonstrate how systems can support consistency without forcing uniformity.

Event details:

Date: Tuesday 19 May 2026
Time: 10am - 11am GMT
Format: Online, via Teams
Cost: Free

A summary of what will be covered:

Why standardisation is back on the agenda
The Goldilocks Zone: not too loose, not too rigid
What the evidence tells us
Designing for proportionality
Case study: standardisation from the coalface
System demo: how standardisation works in practice

There will also be dedicated Q&A time to cover your questions.

During the webinar we'll launch our new white paper which explores this topic in more detail and provides practical tips to help you apply the lessons to your own granting programmes.

We look forward to seeing you at the webinar!

Register now: 10am – 11am GMT, Tuesday, 19th May

Missed any previous editions of SmartyNews? Catch up on all news here.

You're receiving this email because you are a registered user of SmartyGrants, a product of Our Community International in the UK. All SmartyGrants users are advised to remain on this subscription list to receive important system and policy updates.