We have made some changes to the dates of the third and final funding round for the 2024/25 financial year.

The dates have been amended slightly to provide more flexibility for applicants to submit over the holiday period, as well as to line up our assessment dates internally for the rest of the financial year. What that means is that Round Toru will open earlier and close a week earlier than we have previously communicated. So please note the revised timeline below:

Applications open: 12 December 2024

Applications close: 4pm, 30 January 2025

Decisions confirmed, applicants notified: 11 April 2025

This also means that the guidelines for Round Toru will be out earlier and, as usual, we will also host an applicant info webinar where the funding team will answer all your questions about the round and the process of applying. The new dates for these are:

Guidelines for Round Toru released: 3 December 2024

Applicant info webinar: 3-4pm, 4 December 2024 (We will let you know how to register closer to the time)

Current round assessment underway

The funding team is busy assessing around 190 applications for Round Rua, the second funding round for the 2024/25 financial year, which closed on 12 September.

The total requested funding for the round reached over $60million, with a total available funding pool of approximately $20million. That means a big challenge and some difficult decisions for the assessment team as they draft this round’s funding recommendation papers.

Alongside that, the team is also assessing 16 applications to the Reo Māori Content Co-fund which is seeking $17million from an available $8million.

This Reo Maori Content Co-fund is a joint initiative between Te Māngai Pāho and NZ On Air which was designed to fund high-quality, reo Māori screen content for a broad audience. Decisions for this co-fund will be announced on 22 November.

System improvements

We have previously let you know that our systems will soon be changing at NZ On Air.

The first stage will replace our finance system which is no longer supported by Microsoft and does not allow us to be eInvoice-capable, which the Government now wants us to be. As part of this replacement, we are also integrating the finance system with a new NZ On Air funding portal. We’ll also be updating our Communications Centre, which we use to send you emails like this Shorts newsletter.

Bringing all these things together into one NZ On Air Portal will improve efficiencies and make applying for funding and managing the funding process even easier.You will also be able to easily manage your contact information so you are always receiving the communications you want. We will let you know when the new portal comes online and how to get registered ahead of Round Toru going live.

Our key focus is to make the transition as simple and straightforward as possible. We will be back in touch again soon.

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