Electoral Commission: New Initiatives Fund (NIF) Grants Scheme: Records and Digital...

The series contains full and incomplete sets of Commissioners updates, Review Committee meeting minutes, evaluation and audit reports of the grant scheme and paper files of a selection of completed grant project files.

Each paper file is initially titled NIF Project. The file arrangement follows on according to the year the organisation made the application, under the following date format: 02/03, 03/04, 04/05. The final number in the sequence is the number order in which the application came in. For example, if it was the 17th application to arrive in 2002, then the file title would be arranged in the following way: NIF Projects 02/03 017.

References for born-digital records are automatically generated and display a 'Z' after a forward slash, which distinguish them from traditional references allocated to paper and digitised records.

From 2024 The Electoral Commission

Established by the Electoral Commission, the New Initiatives Fund (NIF) grants scheme was launched on 7 October 2002 and closed in January 2006. The scheme provided financial support for innovative projects in the UK focused on raising/increasing awareness and understanding of elections and government. All projects had to demonstrate plans for increasing the knowledge and understanding of current (or pending) electoral systems and democratic institutions for under-represented groups of the population. The fund did not provide grants for projects which involved any element of advocating potential change to elections or existing democratic institutions. In the lifetime of the scheme sixty-two grants ranging from £1,780 to £59,376 were approved, totalling £915,939.