The Funding Tool is a web-based data driven tool designed for assisting organisations to locate funding for renewable energy projects. The Funding Tool was developed on top of a bespoke Query Engine written by SASDATA.co.uk for Future Energy Yorkshire (FEY).
The Funding Tool begins by asking the user an initial fixed set of questions generic to all funding schemes such as Funding Type, application and project deadlines, regional limitations etc. These questions provide the initial filtering of the available funding schemes, ruling out any that the user wouldn’t qualify for at an early stage.
From this point forward the Query Engine takes over the questioning. Subsequent pages contain questions generated from the remaining funding schemes, prioritising the most common questions to narrow down the selection in as few user interventions as possible.
The tool is able to provide users with a login to save their project specifications under their own account and send email alerts to the user when new funding schemes that meet their project criteria becomes available.
How it works
The setup for FEY contains some fixed questions to get the process started, but the Query Engine can alternatively be setup to build a fully dynamic question path.
After the user has answered the fixed questions the Query Engine determines which question to ask next by analysing the impact a negative answer would have on the remaining funding schemes. In other words the Query Engine will choose to ask the question that would potentially filter out the most funding schemes from all the available schemes. The question path is built on the fly by the Query Engine, when the user is presented with a question the tool doesn’t know which question will come next until the user has provided an answer.
There is no predetermined path that the Query Engine follows. The principle is adaptable to similar eligibility problems.
To what extent the system continues to narrow the results can be specified by the user. The tool indicates to the user at every stage of the questioning process the number of funding schemes currently available based on their previous answers. At any point the user can request to view a list of the selected funding schemes or continue to answer questions to further filter the list.
As with all tools the outcome is only as reliable as the quality of the data so the tool’s funding scheme eligibility criteria is regularly updated by FEY staff using a built in administration area.
Click here to try the live Funding Tool on FEY's website.