applying for a grant - how to do it?

eastmidsaver

Hi there,

I apologize if I have posted this in the wrong board. If I have, please kindly advise me of the correct place to send this.

I am seeking advice on the process of applying for grants in the UK.

I have been approached by a community centre to consider a voluntary position to help them apply for grants and raise funds for their causes. They have mentioned that they have been successful in obtaining lottery grants in the past.

I am interested in the opportunity but have no prior experience in this area. I would appreciate it if anyone could provide some guidance on where to begin, how to research potential grants, and the general process of applying for grants.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Savvy_Sue

Google voluntary services Council plus your city/town/county, and see what suggestions they have there.

There is a grant searching tool available, they may offer free access to it. You enter your criteria - what you want the money for, how much, what sort of group you are. You identify possibilities and see how to apply. Don't wait until you've finished searching, start with a very few possibilities. 

Applying is a bit like job hunting. What's the closing date? What do they want, a form or a letter? How can you show your need meets what they will fund? And so on. 

Then you wait, applying elsewhere while you do so. You need a way of tracing when you've applied, when you might hear, what follow up reports will be needed etc.

MalMonroe

Hi, as Savvy_Sue says above, you could use google.

You said, "I have been approached by a community centre to consider a voluntary position to help them apply for grants and raise funds for their causes. They have mentioned that they have been successful in obtaining lottery grants in the past."

So could you ask them how they managed that? Have a chat with the committee, tell them you have no experience but would really like to help. Do they have any idea of which organisations to contact? Can't they help you?  If they've had success with one organisation in the past, then they can tell you how they did it and what you should be doing. Do lean on them, someone in there has the knowledge! Even if they've left now, they could surely help you to start the process - most people are happy to do that - in my experience anyway.

When applying for grants (my daughter has just done it - and now we await the results) you have to locate the organisation you want to apply to and then contact them for an application form and all the details. (Usually sent via email). Then you just follow all the instructions and complete the form. Sometimes with a covering letter, sometimes not.

Good luck with it all.

tacpot12

The process of submitting a grant application starts by carefully reading the information that the grant-awarding body makes available. It's a bit like an exam question, in that you don't want to make a mistake by not answering the question that has been asked!

You then have to explain clearly and succinctly how you will use the money. You need to show that you have a clear plan of how you will spend the money. This might involve explaining how you will split the money over time, or over different aspects of the initiative. If the organisation has any sort of project manager, consult with them about how projects are run in the organisation, and hence what sorts of steps might be needed to run an initiative with the grant money.

Such grants often expect you to report back on your success or failure, so including the steps to gather the data that will allow you to do this is an important part of the how you spend the money.

Having the right controls and data monitoring in place is important so that if the initiative turns out to be impossible to deliver, you can return some of the money to the grant awarding body. This is the very worst outcome for any charity, but it has to remain a possible outcome. You need to protect the charity from any suspicion that it will not use the money wisely, or continue to spend it on a lost cause. You can only do this if you are open to the possibility of failure.

You also have to sell the up-side of the initiative hard. You have to know what the benefit of the intervention will be, and paint a vivid picture of this. Examples of people that have been helped by the community centre, centre's success stories, can be very powerful in communicating the impact that a grant will have.

Explaining something about why the community centre is successful, e.g. what it does differently to other centres, might also work in some cases, but you have to be careful not to pit your worthy cause against other worthy causes. But if the centre has a strength, it should be ok to promote it if done sensitively.  

There is definitely a skill to writing grant applications. You might want to ask any grant-awarding body that you fail to secure a grant from for feedback, so that you can see where you have gone wrong. Again, it's like an interview. Often you will not get any useful feedback, but when you do, it could be enormously valuable.

eastmidsaver

hi.
thanks for your responses.
really useful information which i am sure will be helpful.