A guide to writing a great grant application

Increased demand for funding has left grantmakers inundated with applications and competition is rife. Understanding how to put together a great application will increase your chances of gaining the funding you need for critical projects, however large or focused they are.

Making sure that you are able to clearly define your organisation’s need for funding and how it will benefit your cause and the communities you serve is vital.

Kate Peters, Director of Grantmaking at Community Foundation for Surrey, outlines some of the key things to think about to help you write a successful application.

What makes a great grant application?

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What makes a great grant application?

What makes a good grant application? Something that makes a personal connection with the grant funder. Facts and statistics are really helpful to lay the groundwork to explain the problem that you are trying to fix. What is the issue that the community is facing that you are trying to address? And stories do that really well.

Then it’s about how what you are going to do is going to affect that problem. So getting into how your specific work will make a change for individuals and make their lives better.

Grantmakers are people too and if you can get across the human story of how your work is making people’s lives better, that is going to make a difference.

What should you have in place before you apply?

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Before they apply for a grant, a charity needs to make sure they’ve got their financial processes in place. They’ll need their financial policies, they’ll need a bank account so there’s somewhere to put the grant, and they need to make sure their reporting accounts or their management accounts are in good shape. Grantmakers want to see that you can manage a grant and that you know how to look after your money.

Another really important policy that you need to have in place is safeguarding. That’s something that affects absolutely all charities, they need to have that in place.

If you’re a small group, newly set up, you perhaps haven’t got all your policies in place yet, you’re hoping to become more organised but you need that first grant, you might be able to work with a local parish council, or a council for voluntary service or voluntary action in your community, or sometimes a church will act as a grant holder for you.

You do need to check that the funder you’re interested in applying to will work that way. Some will, some won’t. Again, it’s all about reading that eligibility document.

Can you apply for a second grant?

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If you’re looking for a second grant from a funder, first of all you need to check that that’s something that they do. Some grant makers are very happy to give continuation funding. Others will want you to take a break for a couple of years before you can apply again. So the first step is make sure you read the eligibility so you don’t waste your time.

If they are open to taking your application for a second grant, make sure you’ve reported on your first grant. You can tell the story of how the original grant has made a difference. Of course the funder wants to know that the money they give is making a difference. So, a good report that tells a story of how you’ve changed somebody’s life is really important.

Sometimes things go wrong and the project doesn’t quite work out the way you’d hoped it would, particularly during Covid we’ve seen a lot of that. But grant makers will be really happy to hear about how you learned from that, what you did to adapt to it. So it’s not always bad news if the project didn’t go the way you wanted it. Just tell the grant maker what you did.

What are common mistakes to avoid?

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Common mistakes that applicants will make is using jargon. Using terms that mean something to you because you work in that specific field, but the person reading your application might not recognise. And if they have to go an look it up, well they might not bother. They might just put your application to one side. You need to make it easy for the person reading your application to get what you’re saying and like what you’re saying.

My number one top tip for a charity applying to a grant funder is read their guidance. Take a good look at their website and see what they will fund, what they won’t fund. And save yourself a lot of time.

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