How to write good grants

The essential questions

Most grant application forms ask fourteen questions if you whittle them down to the basics.
These questions can be split between six topic areas:

1. Beneficiaries
How many people will benefit from the project?
What specific need does the project fulfil?

2. Organisational Context
What are your organisation’s overall aims? How do your organisational systems engage and reflect your
beneficiaries (in terms of governance, staffing and consultation)?

3. Relevance of External Environment
How does your project fit in with the work of other organisations? How do you compliment their work/policies and not duplicate them? What is the relevance of the project to our funding criteria and policies?

4. Project Details
What are the aims of the project (SMART* outcomes required)?
What are the key activities? When does the project start and what is the timescale for completion? How much funding is required, for what (the inputs)?

5. Monitoring and Evaluation
How will you monitor the project (outcomes and/or process)?
How will this info be used? What are the evaluation processes?

6. Continuation Plans
If the project continues beyond our funding period, how will you fund it
in the long term? How will you disseminate the results if it ends when our funding
ceases?

Many of your answers to the fourteen questions will remain the same, or very similar, for most organisations whenever you write a new bid. This should save you time and effort when completing grant applications.

Where to focus and what funders want

The question that will likely need the most adaptation according to each grant application is:

“What is the project’s relevance to our funding criteria and policies?”

This will require the most adaptation each time, as projects vary, and every funder will have different criteria and policies.

Why these two questions matter

This is because funders want assurance that your project has some “milage”. They want to know that it will either be the start of something longer-term or that there will be valuable learning from it, if it is a shorter-term project.