Small grants big impact
Most clubs and community groups I have met have never applied for grant funding or if they have they have failed and feel like its out of reach. Those who have never tried tend to give reasons for this like, it’s too hard; we don’t have time; I didn’t know we could; etc.
Those groups who failed to secure a grant have normally done so not because they didn’t have a real need, or their idea was poor but instead because they didn’t know how to effectively put their request across in what is almost always a highly competitive process. In both cases this is a huge shame as a small grant of anything between £500 and £10,000 is very much within the grasp of any community group, sports club, parish council or similar body, you just need to know how to go about it the right way!
Small grants programmes like both the Big Lottery’s Awards for all and Sport England’s Small Grants scheme support thousands of exciting community projects every year, worth anything between £300 and £10,000.
These funds wont meet you day-to-day running costs, if this is an issue you need to look again at your organisations basis business model, which we can also help with.
Grants can however help your organisation do something new or something you have always wanted to do but didn’t know how to make it happen.
They key to success is understanding how to write a great bid and making sure you don’t fall into making a few common errors. Provided you have a good idea, writing these bids isn’t especially complicated once you know what to do, as a result we can help you maximise your chances of being successful for a low fixed fee. We do this in one of two ways, following a discussion to find out if your idea is suitable for grant funding we can either:
- Explain how to prepare your bid and for a small fee review and edit your application before its submitted to help fine tune this
- Work with you directly to write your bid, as it takes more time for us this works out a little more expensive than option one but is still a very affordable service.
