Learn / Funding a first build
A grant, a regulator, a program, and a report in your name
Nobody has a virtual reality line in their budget. Every build People Tech Revolution has delivered was paid for out of money that was already committed to something else, and here is what that looked like each time.
Mater Education, Brisbane
The pilot that two funders paid for
A grant opened the door and the hospital's own money carried the build through it.
Two funders, one report
Mater Education had a feedback program that worked beautifully in a room and could not travel past it. The Queensland Government awarded $40,000 towards turning it into a virtual reality package, which is what got the build started.
Mater Education then put in a further $110,000 of its own through the Corporate Innovation Network. Staff took the result across the Brisbane and regional campuses, and the evaluation went out under Mater's name.
Across that whole Advance Queensland partnership with Mater, project partners contributed $1.56 for every dollar the state committed. On this project the hospital put in $110,000 against the government's $40,000, which is the shape a next funder actually reads.
XRHealth Australia, Victoria
The money was already inside somebody else's pilot
A regulator had funded the program. PTR was brought in to build the part of it that needed building.
The funder came first
A driver who has had a bad day on the road does not come back to the wheel because a policy says Monday. XRHealth Australia was already running a pilot on exactly that question, and it already had a funder.
In their own published words, XRHealth Australia worked with PTR to "co-design innovative immersive applications for a WorkSafe Victoria-funded pilot supporting workplace mental health and recovery in the transport industry". The funding was already in place when PTR was brought in to build.
Central Coast Council, New South Wales
The council had already written down the reason
A strategy with an owner and a budget is a funding source, even when nobody calls it one.
Funded by its own strategy
Central Coast Council did not begin with a technology budget. It began with a strategy to improve disability access and inclusion, and with an Access and Inclusion Reference Group who could say what a beach or a shopping centre actually feels like.
The experience was co-designed with that group and paid for out of the strategy it was written to serve. It has run across the community ever since, which is the part a councillor remembers at the next budget.
Two more, before the company existed and after
A research grant, and a grant for the library itself
The pattern predates PTR, and it paid for the shelf the scenarios now sit on.
The aged care trials that led to all of this were run by QUT Design Lab across six aged care facilities in Queensland and Victoria. Leonie Sanderson managed the virtual reality work through The Ageing Revolution, under a philanthropic research grant from Facebook.
PTR's own scenario library was funded the same way it funds its clients. The Queensland Government's Ignite Ideas round awarded People Tech Revolution $95,000 for the Immersive VR Library, which is why a first build no longer starts from an empty shelf.
What a first conversation needs
Three answers and we can tell you whether it is fundable
Three answers give us enough to tell you whether the build is fundable.
The program it sits inside
Not a new initiative. An existing program with money, an owner and a reporting line: a mandatory training year, a wellbeing strategy, an access and inclusion plan, a mentoring service, a graduate intake.
Who signs it
The person whose name goes on the approval, and the person who has to be convinced before it ever reaches them. Those are rarely the same person, and the second one is usually the one who decides.
When the round closes
Grant rounds and internal budget cycles both run to dates. Tell us the date and you will get a straight answer about whether a build can be scoped, costed and evidenced before it passes.
Sometimes the honest answer is that a scoped pilot fits the date and a full build does not. That answer is worth more than an optimistic one, because it is the one the funder will also arrive at, and it costs you nothing to hear it early.
