How to Read Grant Guidelines

Foreign. Hi, I'm Jessie Ballantyne and I love grants. I sold my house to fund the launch of the Grants Hub because I truly wanted to make grants easier to find. In the very early days, I ended up running the Grants Hub from the ICU ward of a children's hospital. Let's just say I'm committed to the cause of helping you find grants. If you're looking to get real with grants, to learn what works and what doesn't, to hear from grant experts from across the country and have some fun while we do it, then Grants Uncovered is the podcast for you. Hi. Today I'm talking to you about grant guidelines. Now, for many of you, you'll be thinking this is not the most exciting grant topic to be covering, but it is essential to getting your grant applications right before, before you even start applying. There is so much work that goes into putting a grant application together and this is one of the things that quite a lot of people get wrong because they skip over it, or there are so many pages in grant guidelines that they don't get read. And I understand that people are busy, they don't have time necessarily to sit there reading through 30 pages of a Federal government grant program's grant guidelines. But there are three reasons why it is so important to spend time reading grant guidelines. And today I am going to tell you how you can do that that efficiently and effectively so that you're not sitting there plowing through pages and pages of grant guidelines if they're not relevant to you. So I'm going to step you through a few shortcuts to make your grant guideline reading a lot more effective and efficient. Three reasons why. Number one, it's a complete waste of time if you get partway or fully through a grant application and then realise you're not eligible. So we see this a little bit with people who you may have started a grant application and then you get into it and you're like, oh, my goodness, I didn't read this section of the grant guideline guidelines. I'm not actually eligible to apply for this project. So while our organisation was eligible, we're not actually eligible for this particular project. So you may have poured hours into writing a grant application by this point, possibly even started working on a budget. You may have got quotes organised to then realise partway into your grant application that your actual project isn't eligible. Number two, funding bodies can't fund applications that don't meet their criteria. So there's a range of criteria that funding bodies put out. And if you don't meet that criteria, they simply can't give you a grant. And then the third main reason why is submitting an ineligible application is a good way to frustrate funding bodies. So really you want to be building relationships with funding bodies, not annoying them. So we don't want to do things where it's getting on the wrong side of a funding provider. Now, a funding provider is not going to write you off forever if you submit an ineligible application. But they are busy, they get increasingly high numbers of grant applications across their desks every time there's a funding round. And if you have applied for something that's ineligible, it's not going to give them the best impression of your organisation or your business. So, you know, you want to be working towards building relationships with funding providers, not annoying them by something as simple as submitting an ineligible grant applications. Part of the problem with grant guidelines, I think, is that many of you don't understand grant guidelines and they are really quite complex, complex documents at times to read. So we come across terms like community benefit, acquittal, eligibility, retrospective funding, evidence, impact, evaluation, demonstrated need, objectives, assessment, weightings. There are so many big terms in here that, you know, if you've just joined your community gardens committee and you've been nominated as the grants person, you do not necessarily want to be learning all of this new terminology. So I completely understand where you're coming from. Part of being in grants world is that we want to learn to understand some of these words. There are also ways, you know, we can get around them, but they're overwhelming documents. So no one is blaming you for not wanting to read grant guidelines, but let's try and work through them so that we can, you know, get some understanding here and not feel overwhelmed by it. I'm going to step through how I read grant guidelines. Now, I'm not the gospel on grants, so I might have some grant experience, but I'm not the be all, end all of grant funding. Everyone has their own approach. Grant writers, grants consultants, anyone in grants will have their own way that they read grant guidelines. I'm just sharing with you how I do it today and some shortcuts that I find effective so that I'm not sitting there reading pages and pages of grant guidelines. Now, I do see a lot of funding programs across Australia. You know, we look at so many different programs and see the good and the big ones and the short ones, and there's so many different variations of funding guidelines. I simply don't have time to, to read every single page. That's within a grant guideline. So my number one is that I start with applicant eligibility. So I don't really start with the summary of the grant itself, I actually start with the applicant eligibility. So if I'm, you know, looking for a grant for somebody, or if I'm working on one for the organisation that I'm a part of and they're not eligible, there is absolutely no point me continuing with that grant guidelines. I can stop reading straight away because I know no matter what the project is, no matter what my concept is, no matter what my future plans are, none of that's going to be relevant and you'll be the same. You know, you might look at a grant and you think, libraries can't even apply for this grant, so I don't need to keep reading on it. So start with applicant eligibility and then decide whether it's worth you reading or not. If you're not eligible, then just stop, don't keep reading it. Spend your time looking for a different grant or reading different grant guidelines. Next up, I get to grant objectives. So I look at what are the main goals of this grant? What are the specific things that the funding provider is looking to fund in this funding round? Now, that does change sometimes from year to year or funding round to funding round for funding providers. So sometimes we see funding providers keep their programs the same for years on end. They never change them. We know that they will bring them out every quarter or every six months or every year. Often that's timed in with the end of quarters. So the end of March, the end of June, the end of September, the end of December. Grants are quite quarterly, but at times funding providers will change their objectives every year, they will change them every round. So they might have a particular focus that they want to fund this time. And sometimes these follow trends that we're seeing in government. So we might have shifts that happen. You might see a new government policy come out and you can almost predict that that's where funding is going to head in the future. So if a funding provider would have funded your project last round, but you missed out, don't just assume that they will fund it this round either. You need to check that the grant objectives haven't changed since you last looked at that grant application. Project eligibility is what I come to next. So we've done applicant eligibility. That's about the applicant, the organisation, the school, the library, the government, whatever you are, that's the applicant eligibility. Second, we looked at grant objectives. Thirdly, I come to project eligibility. So the specific Project criteria for this grant round. Now, this is slightly different to grant objectives. That's about the overall objectives for the whole grant program. This one is about the actual project itself. So that could be equipment, it could be training, it could be capacity building. There's a whole range of things that fall under project eligibility. Often we see project eligibility, including, it has to be an innovative concept, it needs to be hands on training, it needs to reach a certain number of people. There's, you know, there's aspects that we see to project eligibility that funding providers want to see. It also needs to line up with their grant objectives. But this is about the particular project. Then we read the full grant guidelines. So if you've done those three things, applicant eligibility, tick, read ahead. Grant objectives, tick, you can meet that. Read ahead. Project eligibility, great, you've met the third criteria, then you go on and read the full grant guidelines. So by that point, it's probably worth you spending time reading the 10, 12, 20 pages of grant guidelines, whatever the funding provider has put out. Because if you've ticked off those first three criteria, there's a good chance that you will be eligible to apply. Now, it's not a guarantee. Sometimes there will be things in those grant guidelines that still mean that you're not eligible to apply for that grant. For example, they may request matching funds, a co contribution. So for every dollar you put in, they might want you to put in a dollar yourself. And your organization might not have that, you know, your sports club might not have that spare $10,000 to match the $10,000 grant that you're wanting to apply for. So even though you've met those first three criteria that I've gone through over the grant guidelines, it's not a guarantee. It doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be able to apply for the grant, but that's where you've got to read those full grant guidelines before you submit your whole application. So if you've gone through all of those steps, the applicant eligibility, the grant objectives, the project eligibility, then you've read the full grant guidelines and you can go, tick, tick, tick, tick, then look to apply. So it's at that point that you go to your committee or if you're a sole grant writer for your organisation, then proceed with your application, bring everything together, get people on board to help you out with your grant application where you can, but go in with confidence, knowing that you tick off every element of the grant guidelines and that there's, you know, if you're putting your best foot forward, there's no reason that your grant won't get selected. It's not a guarantee, but it's absolutely more likely that you're going to get funded because you have met all of the grant guidelines that that funding provider has put out. Good luck and I'd love to hear how you go with it. Thanks for joining me on Grants Uncovered. If you'd like show notes, head over to grantsuncovered.com see you next.