Before it goes to the funder
Check your grant application before it goes in
Nobody has read this draft but the people who wrote it. Read it in this order, from the fund's own rules down to the sentence a trustee will be asked about.
Or call 07984 845440, or email [email protected].
Pass one, the fund's own rules
Open their guidance and answer these from the document itself. A summary on a listing site is not the document.
- Are you eligible, on their stated terms, as the organisation that would hold the money?
- Is what you're asking for inside what this fund pays for, and outside anything it says it won't?
- Is the amount you're asking for inside their stated range for this round?
- Does the work you're describing fit the period they'll fund?
- Have you got everything they list as required, and is each item in the format they asked for?
- Is the deadline their deadline, in their time zone, on their portal, allowing for your own sign-off?
If any answer is no, stop and fix that before you touch the prose. Nothing later in this list can rescue an application that fails the fund's own rules, and if the answer is that you can't, the bid or no bid scorecard settles the rest of the question.
What the six passes are held against
Reviewing a grant application means checking it against the fund's own published guidance rather than against your own sense of whether it reads well. Work outward: the fund's rules first, then the questions as asked, the case, the numbers, the attachments, and last a reader who didn't write it. Each pass catches a different kind of mistake, and running them together is how things get missed.
Pass two, the questions as they were actually asked
Put each question at the top of its own answer and read the two together. It sounds obvious. Do it anyway, because reading an answer on its own hides what is missing from it.
- Does every answer address the question that sits above it, in the order the question asks?
- Is anything answered twice, and is anything they asked for missing entirely?
- Are you inside every word or character limit, counted rather than estimated?
- Has any paragraph come from an application to a different fund without being rewritten for this one?
- Does the language match theirs, using their words for the thing they said they wanted to fund?
Pass three, the case for support
Precision is usually the problem, and confidence is why it goes unchecked. Say what the money buys.
- Is the need evidenced with something dated and attributable, rather than asserted?
- Is it evidence about the people you'd serve, in the place you'd serve them?
- Is it clear what would change, for whom, and by when?
- Would somebody outside your organisation be able to tell whether it had worked?
- Is your organisation's part in it specific, so a reader can see why you rather than anybody else?
- Does the story you tell match the numbers in your budget, activity for activity?
Pass four, the numbers
Numbers are where an application quietly contradicts itself, and a narrative total that disagrees with the budget table is the commonest way. It is one of six places where marks go missing.
- Add the budget up yourself, on a calculator, independently of whatever produced the table.
- Check every total in the narrative against the matching total in the table.
- Check that your overheads or support costs are actually in there, at the rate your own policy uses.
- Check whether anything you're entitled to recover has been left out because it felt safer to ask for less.
- Check the arithmetic on any match funding, and check the match is real and dated.
- Check what happens to the plan if they fund part of it, and whether you'd still want it.
An overhead rate set once and never revisited is the quiet one. On one application we read it left real money unasked for.
Pass five, the attachments
Open every file. Everything that travels with the form gets opened and marked too, which is why it is worth a pass of its own.
- Are the accounts the ones the fund asked for, for the year they asked for?
- Are your policies current, dated, and signed by whoever the fund expects to have signed them?
- Does the governing document match the name and number you've given on the form?
- Have you opened every file as a stranger would, and looked at what travels with it?
- Is anything in there that shouldn't be, including tracked changes, comments and anything pasted in from elsewhere?
A live portal login has turned up inside a file sent here for context, which is why that last question is on the list.
Pass six, somebody who didn't write it
Find a reader who has not seen a word of it. Give it to somebody else, with the guidance beside it, and ask them to mark each answer against the criterion above it.
The government's guidance to suppliers says the same thing about tenders, and it holds for grants. Before submitting, arrange for a colleague to provide an independent review.
What does a paid review add?
A colleague reads it as a colleague. A review reads it as the fund will.
A bid review here is £195 for a charity, fixed before anything starts. It's one read against the published criteria, your budget checked line by line, and the weakest answers named with the fix. If you'd rather have the read before you commit, the answer on whether the bid is worth making is free.
If this is one of several this year, what a month of applications covers is set out for a charity reader in full.
If nobody in the building has the time
A fixed-fee review runs every pass on this page against the fund's own criteria.
Send the draft and the guidance
You hear back within 24 hours. If you send a deadline, you hear inside one working day whether we can meet it, and that comes before you pay anything.