Grant Writing – The craft of grant writing

Grant writing is not just about the writing – grant writing is more about the preparation and the development of the strategy. People always ask me about the skills required to be a great grant writer. Everyone always thinks that you have to be someone with experience in writing – maybe someone who writes for a living or someone with a passion for reading/writing novels. To us at Red Tape Busters we focus more on being strategic and getting all our “ducks in a row”. To us the preparation and our strategic approach sets us apart from other grant writing businesses or other grant writers.

Our team are all highly skilled writers but they didn't all start at Red Tape Busters with extensive writing experience. We can train and teach people how to improve their writing – it is far more difficult to teach potential Consultants or grant writers how to be strategic, how to prepare and in essence how to significantly improve the chances of success.

You can write a great grant submission and yet if you have applied for a funding program that doesn't quite fit or you haven’t undertaken enough research to support the project or your project isn't really as well developed as it could have been then it won’t really matter how good the application is – you just won’t win funding. We believe that if you do all the preparation work then if you have decent writing skills – note I said decent – then you can still be successful with your grant applications and reduce the chances of failure.

So just how do we approach the craft of grant writing? Well initially our job is to assess if our client’s project is a realistic chance of winning funding. If not – we won’t write a grant for that project as it stands. We might suggest the client forget the project as there are no prospects of success with funding down the track or we might suggest how to improve the project. For instance we might suggest that the client add some other more “fund able” aspects to the project – disability, Indigenous, multicultural, arts/culture, sport/recreation, woman, children, disadvantage etc etc. With our ongoing clients who engage us longer term we actually work with the client to develop the best project possible.

Once we have a well rounded “fund able” project we then do our research to identify all the funding opportunities open to the organisation. Once all the opportunities are identified then it is about matching the best funding opportunity and then to identify which if any fit this project EXACTLY. Note I stressed exactly – not mostly, not almost – the organisation/project has to fit the requirements of the funding program exactly. 

Once you have the best project possible and have identified the right funding opportunity then you can think about writing the grant. Even now you just don’t charge in – you read the guidelines, read the guidelines then read the guidelines to identify all the requirements of the program with respect to the application, what information are they seeking, what format, what lodgement process, even what font etc? Then you need to read each question carefully and break those questions down and identify the key elements of the questions and make sub headings in the questions as prompts when you are ready to start writing the application. 

As you read the guidelines and the questions you will become aware of supporting information required to support your application, you might need to undertake research to identify statistics or other research which substantiates your case/position and strengthens your application. Maybe you will identify supporting documents you need from within your organisation –  Business Plan, Financial statements, quotes, supporting letters from referees etc. Reading the guidelines carefully and reading the questions and identifying all the information you need to prepare a strong application is an important part of the process – vital in our books.

As you can see with our approach the preparation work is extensive and essential. We haven’t even talked about the actual writing of the grant yet. If you do the preparation work we believe as we have stated – your chances of success will improve substantially and it will make the grant writing work so much easier.

Now – how to actually write the grant – well we will outline those skills in another article. Grant writing as you can see is more, much more than just the writing aspect. So stay tuned!

Contact us at Red Tape Busters - http://www.redtapebusters.com/ should you require more information about this article or if you require specialist  Job application writing or grant and tender writing experience to help your organisation or business win grant funding or achieve successes with tenders.

We are specialists in providing the following services:-

• Lobbying 
• Tender Writing
• Grant Writing
• Resumes/Job Applications
• Organisational/Business Development.