The First Hour

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-03-19

Dominic — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 23:00:00 +0000

@SiobhyB yep – along with 3000 others #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-03-12

Dominic — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 23:00:00 +0000

On train to Liverpool for #100up gathering. Looking forward to meeting everyone. #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-03-05

Dominic — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 23:00:00 +0000

Pleased to say I have a #100up place too for my new startup idea. #
Sign up for Global Entrepreneurship Congress 2012 in Liverpool. Looks like a fabulous event http://t.co/SWOrpPiV #
@IntuitUK looking forward to coming to being part of #Intuit100up and seeing the rest of the group in Liverpool! #
Are you starting out and need a little bit of a cash injection? Fund101 by Enterprise Nation helps you get a grant http://t.co/TZBbSzv7 #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-31

Dominic — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:00:00 +0000

Looking forward to the @thesparkstudio launch tomorrow. Its always great to see new solutions to business space for new businesses #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-01-24

Dominic — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 23:00:00 +0000

Remember if you can't join Manchester's Postgrad Enterprise conference on Monday the 23rd at #mediacityuk use the #entfutures to join in! #
Really enjoyed the #entfutures events. Its great seeing people together sparking and collaborating on new ideas. Well done organisers! #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-12-19

Dominic — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 23:00:00 +0000

@startupbritain I say always believe in what you are doing. It is single-mindedness that will get you where you want to be. #12daysofSUB #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-11-15

Dominic — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Emerald celebrates Global Entrepreneurship Week 2011 with week long access to 15 Enterprise and Innovation titles http://t.co/gW24eht7 #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-10-24

Dominic — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 22:00:00 +0000

7 questions on CVs http://t.co/K3zoIgXL – a lighter way to understand importance of CV's from the BBC #

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-10-17

Dominic — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 22:00:00 +0000

New government funding will stimulate growth-creating innovations: Up to £18 million of new government funding i… http://t.co/t0yP8nll #
Money talks even in the internship slave trade | Nick Cohen
http://t.co/R0gmpNSj – still proves there is a long way to go. #
Mini-guide to writing a better (your first!) proposal for funding? http://t.co/Zljomcaj #
HEFCE announces student number controls for 2012-13. Get your bids in now (!) http://t.co/LssQa91U #
See our latest blog post: http://t.co/Zljomcaj http://t.co/9fV93dm0 #

What is the secret to good bid writing?

Dominic — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 19:20:53 +0000

If you ask people to write a proposal to change a process, or to justify a product or service that they provide or to write a board paper, they diligently sit down and do a pretty good job. You ask those same people to write a funding bid, put together a business development proposal and they go into a cold sweat and hunt around for someone else to do it.

I’ve been writing funding bids for a long time and I’ll admit it was like a mystical art/science when I first started but to be honest it should be no more difficult than some of the other aforementioned core management tasks – the secret is how you set about it and break the task into easy to manage chunks. If I can narrow it down into three key areas that help that constitute my top tips then they would be:

1) Gather your information and shape the team
No bid writer can hope to understand the intricacies of a decent proposal in depth, but if they are writing it on behalf of people who want the money/funds then all the information the writer will need will be in the heads of the people s/he can gather round a table. The shaping of the bid is dependent on the people there. Use the time effectively, ask the right questions and get agreement on where to get further information and you can start to get there.

2) Plan and structure your proposal in depth – then be succinct
As with most things in life, you get nowhere unless you put the work in. Most bid writers I know look at word limits on funding applications as necessary evils. The secret is not to fill the sections with lots of words but to be as concise as possible to describe and understand the outputs that will be needed. This requires you to plan how the proposal will work, who will be involved and what the key tasks are. Go into too much detail and you will lose the reader, don’t describe the issues in enough depth and risk the bid looking vacuous or directionless.

3) Think like your funder
The easiest thing for me to do to get a good funding proposal is for me to take someone else’s first draft and edit it into a coherent document. This is because I can read other people’s work with a dispassionate view and remove the superfluous and concentrate on the main reasons and rationale for the bid. If it’s your own work, that will be more difficult to do, but try and think like the funding body. They are likely to get lots of bids, so is yours innovative? Does it address their requirements (not yours!)? Is it SMART? Be hard on your proposal – because they will be. If you can address any possible question they might have, then you are a big step closer to your goal.

So I’m reviewing this article and realise there is a lot more to it than following a three step guide described above, but if you have never done a funding proposal before then following these three key elements in your proposal will give you a much better outcome than not paying heed to them. If you want more information on writing an effective funding bid there are plenty of decent sources out there and of course you can always talk to us if you really do want us to assist!