Over the past 15 years, we’ve written, project managed, or consulted on a large number of funding applications.
When you live and breathe these things, over time you start to notice the recurring patterns that appear in every successful project. The stand out attributes that separate the stellar applications from the hundreds (if not thousands) of merely average submissions funds receive every single year.
The EIC accelerator is no different in this regard, and there are many simple things that you and your grant writing team can do to improve your chances of success. In this article, our funding team shares with you their top five tips for a high quality submission that will increase your chances of funding success.
1. Be an all-rounder
It’s one thing to have a fantastic, innovative, and game-changing product. It’s quite another to have a team who can deliver on it’s vision, a timely strategy that can be fully executed on, and an enterprise that is being run to its full potential.
Standing out from the crowd in grant funding is often showing that you have all of the pieces of the puzzle (other than additional capital) to deliver on the product of service you want to scale-up or bring to market. Focussing on the strength of your team and project partners is a sure fire way to impress on a funding assessors that you have the holistics to execute on your plans should you receive the funds.
2. Tell a compelling story
Funding evaluators are human, and humans like stories. When given the choice between a compelling, consistent and interesting submission, or a statement of facts that lack fluency and connection, you’re losing valuable points by not delivering on the former.
A good grant writer can be an effective storyteller while capturing the core messages of your enterprise. Delivering a document that captivates and informs.
Just because something is technical or abstract does not mean it should be boring. Find the story.
3. Make the submission sexy
We don’t just communicate with words. There’s 20,000 year old paintings on the cave walls in Lascaux, France that can attest to this fact.
Using quality images, graphics, digital assets and video can bring a submission to life.
Use consistent fonts and layout. Someone is going to spend a lot of time looking at this document, so make it look nice!
Thinking about your document as a piece of marketing material means you can employ visuals to best influence and enthral your fund assessor. We regularly work with our creative partners (primarily graphics and video) to ensure the submissions that we submit meet a high visual standard – and it correlates with success.
We are programmed to associate quality with the style in which it is presented. Be it a website, a product visualisation, or the layout of a page spread. So make informed creative decisions about ALL of your assets.
4. Think like an investor
That is to say, think about the value of your proposition. While you may not be applying for equity funding yet, thinking about the wider commercial implications of your venture can go a long way to showing your evaluator that you have a deeper understanding of your product and market.
Grants are ‘investing’ in you for the same reasons that a venture capital fund might, they see both growth and disruptive potential. So show them what they want to see.
5. Speak their language
This doesn’t just mean making sure to measure in Euros (you should), it means understanding the lexicon, keywords, and structure of the particular fund you are dealing with. For the EIC Accelerator, we work exclusively with grant writers who are both based in Europe and have extensive experience working with both Horizon Europe and previous European grant structures.
Choosing a grant writing partner who can translate your vision into the type of thing the funding assessor wants to hear, can save you a whole lot of frustration and wasted time – in our experience.
Your European Grant Partners
Funding is out there.
Brexit has added a new layer of complexity to the European Grant Funding landscape for innovation-led and globally-minded businesses in the UK.
