Government Grant Writing Consultants
We’re experienced in writing grant applications for Innovate UK, SBRI, NIHR, Horizon Europe, DASA and many other calls.
Introduction to grant application writing
Our bid writing team combine experience across industries to provide industry leading bid writing and grant funding support. Applying for grant funding is time consuming and can be a distraction to business as normal activities. Let our team identify, prepare and submit grant funding applications on your behalf, allowing you to focus on what you do best – managing and leading your growing organisation.
Our Clients
8 things to consider before applying
Market Potential
Freedom to operate
State aid compliance
Timescales
Team
Innovation
Socio-economic benefits
Ability to match-fund
Our approach to grant writing: How we help you succeed
We assess your project idea and help you to develop your proposition
We identify the most appropriate grants for you
We prepare the grant application on your behalf
We support you during the grant acceptance process (and beyond)
Grant Application Writing FAQs
The competition guidance usually includes a detailed breakdown of the scored application questions, word limits and page limits of supporting appendices. It’s important that you carefully read and distil the guidance. If the competition body has been kind enough to provide a breakdown of the information sought as part of each scored question, use this as a guide when structuring your response.
Appendices may be “optional” but in reality, they aren’t; your competitors will no doubt use the additional space to their advantage.
The assessors are looking for proposals that present a viable opportunity for growth, high risk technical innovation and a credible team with robust commercialisation plans. Clear and concise responses are essential, as is quantification and justification of underlying assumptions.
The fund holder appoints a panel of independent assessors, each of which has relevant sector expertise, knowledge and experience. Applications are typically assessed by a panel of up to five industrial and academic assessors. Assessor scores and feedback are reviewed to ensure that the assessors adhere to guidelines and score fairly.
Assessors are required to sign a contractual assessor agreement which covers confidentiality, declarations of interest and conflicts of interest.
This varies and is usually dependent upon two factors: a) the size and type of organisation making the application and b) the stage of research and development. The precise details are usually set out in the competition guidance, it’s always best to double check rather than make assumptions.
Typical grant percentages:
The celebrations begin in earnest. In parallel you may be asked to provide documentation to demonstrate your ability to match fund (e.g. most recent audited/unaudited year-end financial statements or a cash Flow forecast covering the period of the project). If you have collaborators you will need to produce a signed collaboration agreement (its good practice to give this some consideration during the application stage, particularly if it needs to be signed off by legal teams). Document requests may also include an exploitation plan and revised second level project delivery plan (providing the Monitoring Officer with the level of detail required to monitor project progress).
Don’t despair, when one door closes more often than not another door opens. If your application isn’t successful you can usually reapply, for example Innovate UK allows a maximum of two applications for any given proposal.
You will receive a copy of the assessor feedback, including their perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of your initial submission responses. You may disagree with the nuances, but it’s important that you use this feedback to your advantage. If they have highlighted failings or missing information, it’s imperative that these issues are addressed as part of your resubmission. In parallel, re-review the question guidance and double check that your response answers each question in full.
