For the last few years, the NSW Environment Trust has taken a risk. They asked ME to facilitate ‘project initiation workshops’ for the winners of their environmental education grants (examples), usually around four $250,000 grants per round, plus a similar number of $60,000 grants.
The Trust wants to tackle a chronic problem in standard grant-making: rushed applications based on poorly developed or vaguely articulated concepts that doom projects before they begin. Those applications miss opportunities and risk marching off in the wrong direction (or being so boring so they don’t actually engage anyone).
The project initiation workshops bring each winning team together to take a fresh look at their project purpose, clarify their theory of change, and dream up ‘funology’ ideas to excite their audiences.
Participants love these workshops because they get to think outside the box, which is a surprise and a pleasure.
I do love this work, but one thing gets on my goat. Frankly, a lot of grant applications are poorly written.
A message to grant applicants everywhere:
It’s not about how much you write, it’s about how succinctly you express your vital ideas so they leap off the page and straight into the minds of the technical review panel. Your job: clearly articulate the results the funder will get for their investment.
Technical review committees will not be persuaded by obscure, vague language and superfluous or irrelevant text.
Here’s a helpful guide. It will help you win grants.
Use plain English
Use crisp, simple, plain English. Avoid fluffy abstractions like the plague. That means using concrete word pictures and numbers.
Do not pad out with empty verbiage. It makes you look like you can’t organise your ideas and are non-committal about how you’ll deliver the project.
Take a red pen and ruthlessly delete anything that obscures the clean simple lines of your proposal. Your application is not an academic paper, it’s a communication to practical people who are in a hurry.
The #1 question to keep asking
The trick is to replace vague abstractions with tangible observables: actions and results we can see, touch, and count! So ask yourself this one question relentlessly:
“What activities/actions/results will we observe?”
Replacing intangibles with observables makes your project real and helps you communicate it more clearly.
Compare these examples:
Oh so terrible:
“This project will address the lack of stewardship for the local environment by working directly with private landholders through a combination of education and engagement methods to create behaviour change and therefore improve native vegetation cover within the region and increase the habitat value of private areas allowing for greater movement and protection of threatened species.”
This is ‘fluff-speak’. I might read it but I have no idea what the project is actually going to DO!
Much better:
“Through family-friendly events, a citizen science program, and a new Landcare group we will engage at least 16 rural landholders in the Smiths Creek catchment in planting and weeding to regenerate threatened Littoral Rainforest on their properties. Our target is a minimum 40% increase in native vegetation cover in three priority ecological corridors within 3 years.”
Ah-ha! Now I can see the project in my mind.
The core content
You’ll need to express the following things in succinct plain English, using concrete facts and numbers.
1) The problem is significant and poorly addressed. The problem should be important, and yet local enough to be realistically attacked by the funds you are seeking – that might require hard choices about narrowing the scope of your effort.
2) Your project has a strategy to credibly attack the problem EITHER by directly reducing its impact over time OR by testing an innovative approach that can inspire other actors.
You should express your strategy via a simply-stated theory of change. That means you’ll need to HAVE A THEORY OF CHANGE CLEAR IN YOUR OWN MIND before you start writing the application. This is the single most important pre-thinking you should do.
[Don’t be scared of the term ‘theory of change’. It’s means a simple description of your strategy, including your project activities, the immediate responses you expect from each target audience, and the medium and long term results you hope to achieve. See below for an example of a theory of change (a.k.a. program logic).]
3) Your team can be trusted, either because of their proven track record in the area, or because of the credibility and expertise of your partners.
4) The scale of your project should easily pop out, expressed in numbers (people, sites, properties, hectares). This will direct you to indicators and targets that become the basis of your project evaluation.
5) Describe how your legacy will ripple out. How will you inspire others with your story and spread enthusiasm for the innovative ideas you test?
Which brings us to the other big question:
‘How will we create a legacy for our project?’
If you ask this question from the very beginning it’ll focus you on what’s really important about your project. After all, if it leaves nothing for the future, what’s the point of funding it?
6) Remember to include references to facts and numbers.
And lastly, edit ruthlessly.
“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
Happy grant winning folks!
