What shipped in July: data in Spaces, grants that return

Spaces can hold your data, not just your documents

Spaces are where an organisation keeps its shared knowledge — notes, plans, documentation. They can now also hold structured tables: a partner list, a grant pipeline, a project tracker.

You build the table as you work. Add a column when you need it, link a row to a row in another table, and let numbers add themselves up across those links. The same data can be a kanban board for your programme team, a calendar for everyone else, or a timeline for a funder — you just switch the view.

Tables can start from templates aligned to IATI, the reporting standard many funders already use, and export to CSV, Markdown or IATI. Any table can also be shared as a public read-only link, so a partner or funder can see it without an account.

Already using Notion? You can bring a single database over, or move an entire space in one go — pages, tables, comments and files included, with your files re-hosted here rather than left on links that expire.

Talk about the work, on the work

Highlight any sentence on a page and comment on it, reply, resolve, mention a colleague. Commenting is free for anyone who can read the page, so nobody is locked out of the conversation by their plan.

Spaces on desktop

Spaces are now fully available in the desktop app, not a reduced version of it — exports save where you expect, links you copy work for whoever you send them to, and your drafts don't linger after you sign out on a shared machine.

Funding calls that come back

Many grants run on a cycle — yearly, twice-yearly, quarterly. On most platforms the deadline passes, the listing expires, and next year somebody has to find it all over again.

Here, a cyclical call stays visible, marked closed with its next expected window. Save it and you'll get a heads-up about two weeks before it reopens — enough time to prepare, rather than discovering a three-week window on its final day — and confirmation when it genuinely reopens.

That distinction matters: we never reopen a call on a predicted date. When the window comes due, we go back and re-read the funder's own page for the real dates first. And if a funder moves the call to a new address on their site, it's recognised as the same call, so what you saved still points to it.

Every opportunity now shows its SDGs

Funding calls, volunteering and everything else on the platform now carry UN Sustainable Development Goals, shown as the official tiles and clickable straight into a filtered search.

We were deliberately strict here, because a wrong goal is worse than a missing one: a goal is only attached when the source text itself supports it, word for word. If a call shows no goals, that usually means its own description didn't clearly point to any.

Also new

A rebuilt front page that shows what's actually happening on the platform right now rather than a static pitch. Video on project updates, so field footage sits alongside the write-up on public update pages. And dark mode throughout.

What's next

Social connectors are nearly ready — nine platforms including Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon and WordPress, so an update posted here reaches the channels you already run, once. Our mobile apps arrive in the app stores next week.

More to come on next update