As an organisation, one of our key goals is finding effective treatments, on a journey to ultimately prevent MS. Our ambitious Stop MS Appeal is on its way to raising £100 million to fund the groundbreaking research that will make this happen.
We pride ourselves on only funding the best research, according to the priorities chosen by people with MS. Our Research Team work hard to ensure that any research we fund supports our goals and is of high quality. It needs to meet the conditions of the grant application, and be peer reviewed by other researchers.
Even when we’ve agreed to fund a research project, things can change. We‘ve stopped funding where initial results have indicated that it wouldn’t be worthwhile to continue, for example. And we’ve stopped when a researcher has failed to deliver what was stated in the grant application.
A lot of detailed evaluation by the Research Team is required to ensure that a research project remains a good use of our funds. So, it’s very important that groups don’t attempt to send funding directly to researchers or universities.
A researcher conducting poor-quality research with money received from a group could claim they were funded by the MS Society. This could cause us reputational damage, and also mean that the money is not put to best use for people with MS.
How to donate group funds towards research
If your group would like to contribute towards our research programme, this is the process to follow:
A group signatory needs to email the donation request to [email protected].
This request must CC in another signatory on the group’s bank mandate. The email needs to include the amount and what the donation is for (as explained below, please try not to make this too restrictive).
Treasury will check that the signatories are valid and the donation is for a valid project, and will then process the donation.
If you’d like the money to go to a particular area of research, you’re welcome to state this in the emails. It’s helpful if you don’t focus on just one specific project. We always try to find an external donor to fund some or all of a project, before turning to group donations. So, please give us some options as to where you’d like the money to go. We can then allocate your donation alongside the income we’re generating from external funders.
Many thanks for all your support.
