The success rate for funding applications can vary from charity to charity. The lower end of the range is around one successful bid in seven, but for some charities the success rate is as high as 50%.

Like most funding streams, trust and grant funding has been on quite a ride as a result of COVID-19. In 2019, it was estimated that around £3bn was awarded to charities as government grants. By 2020, only one in three charities reported receiving government funding – a reduction on the previous year.

Many trusts launched emergency grant schemes to support charities through the crisis and they are continuing to take applications and pay out through late 2021 and and early 2022, but emergency funding won’t last forever.

For the remainder of the crisis and beyond, here are a few tips on how to write better bids, up your success rate, and get more of your projects funded.

Ten ways to increase your application success rate

MAKE SURE YOU ARE A GOOD MATCH

If you think you might be stretching a funder’s criteria to fit your project when you add them to your prospect list, beware. The things that seem like a small gap in fit at a glance can grow into a gaping chasm when you get into detail on the application form.

RESEARCH, RESEARCH, RESEARCH

Research the funder, the funding decision-makers, and other charities who have made successful funding bids in the past. Many charities actively support each other through the funding process – find your fundraising allies.

Funder priorities are changing. Increasingly, they are assessing how charities operate – particularly how inclusive they are – as well as what they can actually achieve.

READ THE QUESTIONS AND GUIDANCE CAREFULLY

It may sound obvious, but one of the best tips is to give the funder what they want – exactly what they want. Whether they ask you to fill in an online form, create a video, write a letter, or stick to a particular word count, do it! 

BUILD YOUR BUDGET FROM THE FOUNDATIONS UP

Doing the work to build a budget from the ground up will demonstrate your commitment to managing the grant properly. If you can, take a bottom up approach by getting no-obligation quotes from potential suppliers and carefully calculating staff costs based on projected salary brackets.

Drafting a basic project timeline will help to visualise all potential activities and their costs. You should also consider core costs – things like office rent, utilities, management salaries and financial audit costs.

Sometimes these are included as a standard percentage (10–20%) and sometimes as full cost recovery where all core costs are divided across projects. Check the funder’s guidance on including core costs before adding them in.

SUSTAINABILITY

Explain how you plan to continue the work that the grant will fund. Will the project need to be repeated? How will you retain the knowledge from the project within your organisation?

BE CLEAR ABOUT YOUR PLANS

Your application should make it very clear what you expect to do with the money; how the project will work and who will be involved. It should also provide detail on the outputs and outcomes expected from the project. If your project was a cake, the output would be the cake itself and the outcome would be the delight of the people who get to eat it.

TELL YOUR STORY

Having a clear, consistent, and compelling story to tell will really help your application to shine. Gather together the elements that will help you describe how your project will create positive, lasting change.

This might include an explanation of the problem you want to solve in one sentence, statistics, or case studies that illustrate the impact you can make, or a description of your vision for change in the communities you support.

BE STYLISH

Complexity is the enemy of style when you’re writing. Using simple, accessible language will help the reader to access the information they need without effort.

Don’t be scared of talking about your project emotively. Show how much you care about your work and why the funder should, too. Writing with your heart hard-wired to your keyboard will never let you down.

BE CONSISTENT ACROSS YOUR COMMS CHANNELS

Funders will check you out. They will look at your easy-to-find digital channels and check that what you say publicly matches what you say in your application. With a good comms strategy in place, your charity’s values, vision, and impact should shine through on your social media and website. 

PROOFREAD

Make sure someone is proofreading for spelling, grammar, and meeting the funder guidance. Your application may be read and contributed to by a number of experts in the organisation, but at least one of them should perform editorial checks.