How to strengthen your application
The following learning points have been taken from previous grant rounds and may help you strengthen your application.
General feedback
- When applying for project funding, ensure your answers specifically talk about that work and not generally about your organisation
- Be clear and concise - make sure it's clear what will be achieved with the funding and/or what the impact will be
- Clarify who will benefit from your work or activity (including their involvement, specific needs and evidencing those needs)
- Have a clear mission statement/vision
- Applicants who answered briefly and succinctly tended to score more highly; longer answers tended to be difficult to follow and scored lower
- Ensure your budget balances
- Higher scores awarded to applications that were truly cross-sector
- Confirm what your risks are and have a clear mitigation strategy
- Don't duplicate activity already taking place in Oxford
Criteria-specific feedback
Equalities, diversity and inclusion
- Using your organisation’s HR equalities policy is not sufficient to answer how your project or activity will address inequalities
- Ensure you support your answer with data/evidence
- Those with an action plan and monitoring scored more highly (a baseline action plan and monitoring was the gold standard)
- Those who were actively including those experiencing inequalities or showing particular customer care scored more highly
Environmental sustainability
- This is an area that many applicants scored much lower on and an area for improvement
- Not everyone understood the impact of their project or activity
- Many were not specific about how they planned to mitigate their impact, but instead wrote about general ways to be green
Partnership working
- Those able to clearly demonstrate how they support organisations scored more highly
- Disconnect between delivery partners and partnership working; not as developed as it could have been
- Higher scores awarded to well-established partnerships, that were genuinely cross-sector
- Lack of awareness of other organisations working in similar fields
- Those adding in what their partners contributed scored more highly
Health and wellbeing
- Be specific about how your work or activity will provide meaningful health and wellbeing benefits
- Those that were able to point to evidence of impact scored more highly
Attracting other funding
- Those able to attract/evidence greater levels of funding elsewhere received higher scores (including planned applications)
Innovation
- This is about going above and beyond business as usual (e.g. in most cases, the use of video calls isn't considered innovative)
- Could include implementing best practice from elsewhere, trying new ways of working or embedding learning from pilot schemes elsewhere
Inclusive economy
- Applicants score more highly where they can demonstrate that resources are shared more widely within the local economy
- Payment of the Oxford Living Wage scores more highly