Posted 2:10pm
Applications can take a while. Normally, especially with funding, you have a limited number of words or characters, and in that time you have to interest the company enough to influence them to give you the money you need. It's a fine line, and takes more than a few drafts.
The initial draft normally looks good. That is until you pass it on to others to review. I have done this with our Awards For All application. The main section. where you describe why you need the money, requires 4000 characters. That sounds a lot, but when push comes to shove it turns out to be more difficult than it sounds.
I am very grateful to my board, all of whom have come back with amendments and suggestions. Their guidance made me realise that a lot of changes had to be made. Several drafts later, and quite happy, I then took it to a meeting I had with Voluntary Action Islington on Friday. The meeting was about reviewing our Business Plan, and was very useful. I did not intend on bringing up the Awards For All, but as I had to email a copy of our current Business Plan to my contact Maria, I thought I would send along the application too.
Her advice was to make quite a few more changes. Two of my board had made similar pointers to me. But it is this sort of advice that can really boost HMHB. I like to think I am democratic. I know we are always learning, and a lot of what we are doing is new to me. So I have just changed the document once more - to include more about the problem, what we are providing to solve this, and why we are unique and require the funding. It's for a total of £10,000. She believes we have an excellent chance of getting the funding, but needed to be clearer in our explanation.
We got it down to around 3990 characters, so not bad. I am sure there will be a few more tweaks before we remit the application this week. But it is nice knowing people are spending their time helping us make sure we give ourselves the best chance possible of funding.
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