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

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

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

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

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

Those able to attract/evidence greater levels of funding elsewhere received higher scores (including planned applications)

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

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