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You are here: Home > Community and Living > Fundraising information > How to apply for grants > Ensuring good communication

Ensuring good communication

This page provides information about investing in good communication with the grant-making organisation before making a grant application.

Before making your application it is worthwhile investing time in fostering a relationship with the grant-making organisation. If you can, cultivate a champion in house e.g. get the case officer on your side or, possibly, a trustee (although whatever you do, don’t try to circumvent due process). You may be given an indication of whether or not your project is likely to succeed before you spend time and other resources on putting your bid together, and you may be given some tips on how to frame your application.

This can work both ways as funders do not want to be overwhelmed with ineligible projects - but remember, they are busy people so strike a balance between a good working relationship and becoming a pest! This is particularly important with smaller trusts that may rely on a few volunteers to administer grants.

A well-written application will certainly improve your chances. You will not only have marshalled your ideas and the argument for supporting you in a more persuasive and readable way, but you will also have given the reader the impression that you are well-organised and capable; sufficiently so to be entrusted with their money.

Writing in plain English

Faced with the task of writing a good application, some people find it hard to put their thoughts together in a clear, logical way. Others develop a writer’s block, so that although they have thought through what they want to say, they don’t actually get around to putting anything in writing.

An application is no more than answering simple questions such as:

(a) Who are you?
(b) What do you currently do?
(c) Why is this work important?
(d) What do you need to enable you to do it?
(e) How can the donor help you?

If you were answering these questions in conversation, you would become really enthusiastic. And, in doing so, you would then enthuse the person you were approaching for money. In your written application you have to try to create this same sense of up-beat enthusiasm.

Things to AVOID

• Avoid using jargon – the words that only you and the professionals in your field know the meaning of. In an application you are usually talking to people who know little of the detail of what you are doing, and are unlikely to understand the specialist words you take for granted.
• Using inflamed words, such as unsubstantiated superlatives. Words and phrases such as ‘desperate’, ‘unique’, ‘a major new initiative’ have lost their meaning through over-use and should be avoided if possible. The reader will also be reading dozens of other applications all of which show desperate needs and unique solutions to the urgent problem. They want to know the facts and the figures, not the generalities expressed in the same meaningless superlatives.
• Avoid the ‘everybody knows’ syndrome, where you make a bland statement on the assumption that the reader will understand its full significance. In any case this doesn’t convince the reader that you are particularly on top of the subject. If you can’t show a deep understanding of the issues, how can you persuade the reader that you have a clearly workable solution?
• Just waffling on and on. You drown the meaning in a sea of useless words. Make every word work for you. Use a red pen to strike out what is meaningless; what adds nothing to your case.
• Producing a continuous stream of syllables where it could be expressed more succinctly simply by tightening up the language.

Tips for BETTER writing

• Write in shorter sentences
• Break up longer sentences into a number of sentences
• Use bullet points to break up long sections of text
• Vary the length of sentences to avoid monotony
• Use shorter rather than longer words, say ‘about’ rather than ‘approximately’
• Use facts rather than opinions
• Keep it short and simple, but make sure you say all you need to say!
• Make it clear and logical
• Keep cross-references to a minimum. Otherwise it can all get too confusing
• Improve the visual appearance and readability i.e. shorter paragraphs, headings, tables, bullets etc.
• Write for the reader, understand their level of knowledge and their perception of the problem.