Can past winners guide your future success?
Qualifying any given grant opportunity is your important first step to make sure you use time wisely, and maximise chances of success with grant seeking. To qualify, you want to know:
- Is my organisation eligible AND competitive?
- Is my project eligible AND competitive?
Unfortunately there can be a LOT of guesswork involved in this process.
Even though grant guidelines provide pages and pages of information, you can still finish reading them with residual uncertainty about whether or not your project really fits what the funder is looking for. Phone calls to administrators can help, but don’t always provide the clarity you really need (this is particularly true of government bodies).
One of the most illuminating things you can do is to thoroughly read the list of previous grant winners. For an established grant program with multiple rounds, there is a lot of publicly available information that you can make use of.
Analysing past winners can helps you to craft a more competitive application in the following two ways:
1. Knowing Your Place in the Market: Budget
One of the key problems that prevent grant success is asking for too much money. Reading about past winners will show you whether you’re asking too much in comparison to other organisations who are equal to or exceeding your level of service quality.
2. Knowing Your Place in the Market: Project Design & Outcomes
Grant makers want to ‘back a winner’, so you need to figure out what their version of ‘winning’ is, rather than telling them your own version of success.
For example, some grant makers clearly want to support tangible outcomes in a defined geographic area with a clear target audience. They want truthful impact rather than hopeful scale. Measurable outcomes may be prioritised, and by reading about past winners you can see that unless you demonstrate certainty in project outcomes you are unlikely to achieve success. Claiming that you can transform the futures of 10,000 young people with a grant of $20,000 won’t win here.
Other grant programs may exclusively fund large, scalable projects where broad impact (instead of deep) seems to be favoured. In this case, you might be able to see that unless your project reaches thousands of beneficiaries and has a total project budget of $500k+, it’s probably not competitive.
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Following repeated knock-backs, I’ve seen organisations gain success by simply lowering their funding request to a more competitive position. Similarly, some straightforward project design changes can also improve competitiveness no-end.
I encourage you to make use of the info that’s already out there to understand exactly what each grant maker is looking for, and then put your best foot forward to maximise your chance of success.
Good luck!
