Ten Points to Ponder to Keep Your Grant Application Away From Rejection

Mistakes are inevitable. However, we can still prevent ourselves from committing errors. These gaffes can be tolerable at some point, but not at all times. And they should not be present in a grant application.

Prior to sending your grant application to potential funders, you better read these ten helpful tips first to position your grant application away from big disappointment and rejection. Receiving fund is a competition, so don’t ‘harm’ your proposal by making one of these common mistakes:

Tip 1. Create a professional e-mail address
Spend time to review your e-mail. Does it pleasantly sound professional and formal? If your e-mail address casts a negative light, better create a new e-mail address for business purposes. Ideally, it should be attached to the name of your organization if you are applying for grant on their behalf. So you@businessname.com or at the very least, you should have businessname@hotmail.com. But do keep in mind that some people will view an organization as somewhat unprofessional if it uses any kind of e-mail service (whether it is @hotmail.com @aol.com or even @comcast.net). So it makes sense to set up your own e-mail address to use for all official business purposes.

Tip 2. Submit a completely written grant application
Incomplete information is one of the major reasons why a grant application get disqualified/or rejected. So when you are ready to submit your application, evaluate every detail again and again. Double check all the requirements and make sure you include all of them. Make sure that you have filled up the application completely. It is very true that sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees, so double check and make sure that everything is complete as required for the application.

Tip 3. Review your application to ensure grammatical accuracy
You want your application to be professional as it can get. So if you know that your spelling or grammar is not your strongest point, then either run it through a spelling and grammar checker (Microsoft Word has one built in that you can use, if you have it) or get an expert to edit it for you. There are many times that applications were denied simply because the grammatical errors are very glaring. So before you submit your application, make sure it is completely polished without any spelling or grammatical errors that could cost you that grant.

Tip 4. Age-proof your application
Whether or not it is permitted by the law, oftentimes, there is age discrimination when it comes to anything related to business. But don’t forget, it works both ways. If you need to specify a job experience as part of your grant application, or if you fall into the “older demographic,” you probably don’t want to list the jobs you have held all the way back to the 1970s. Unless of course, it is particularly relevant to the business you are applying a grant for. Likewise, if you are in your early twenties, it will work to your advantage if you would include the jobs you held as a teenager to make your job history look as comprehensive as it can be.

Tip 5. One size doesn’t fit all
Your grant proposal should be tailored specifically to the requirements and guidelines of the funding organization in which you will submit your proposal to. You can’t just print out another copy of it and send it to another grantor. Perhaps, there are some pieces of information that will remain the same. But you still need to ensure that your application fits with what a funder is specifically looking for. Before sending your application, read it again. Don’t make that big mistake of sending an application to the “ABC grant program,” only to discover later that you are supposed to apply for the “123 business grant program.”

Tip 6. Be justifiably specific
Reasoning out that you need funding assistance to “start your business” or to “grow your business” isn’t good enough. Funding organizations need to know how and what exactly you will be doing with the grant money once it is awarded to you. So instead of merely saying you would use the money to start your business, be more specific such as ‘the grant money would be used to establish a women-owned business of technological waste recycling.’ Failing to do this would mean your inability to clearly detail your budget plan, which is apparently a big turn off for grant committees.

Tip 7. Research
When you find that particular grant you believe your project is perfect for, make sure that you do a research about that grant program and the organization providing that grant. If it is a yearly business grant, study the types of projects that have been awarded in the past. How did they use the grant money? If your project has several similarities with them, then focus on how you can play up your strengths in similar areas.

Tip 8. Submit the application with the necessary requirements
So the grant you are applying for requires that applicants should have a Bachelor’s degree to become eligible to apply. But you are sure they won’t mind the fact that you have only three years of your degree and never finished it. Wrong. If you don’t meet all the requirements such as specific education requirements, residency requirements, citizenship requirements, and even specific affiliation, don’t expect that your application will pass the scrutiny of the meticulous grant committee members. So make sure you read and meet all the application requirements before you go to the time and effort of preparing and submitting an application.

Tip 9. Meet the deadline
Just because you are very much confident that your application is perfect and that the grant program is perfectly suited for you, you think the grant awarding committee won’t mind that your application is three weeks late? WRONG. Make sure you submit your application before the deadline. If you are mailing it, make sure it is mailed at least one or two weeks prior to the deadline, so you know it will be received in time. Don’t think that you can reason out that your application is postmarked on the deadline date, it will be useless.

Tip 10. Learn from your past experience
If you have been turned down for every single grant you have applied for over the last two years, it is definitely time to figure out why. It is very likely that there are either some loopholes with your application or you are applying for the wrong type of grants. If you get turned down for a grant, it doesn’t hurt to write a thank you letter to the grant committee and ask if there was anything in your application that caused it to be turned down, so you can improve it for the next time. They might not respond back, but your letter just might end up landing on a person’s desk who might take the time to write you a valuable response. You can also ask other business people for their feedback so you can strengthen you next grant proposal. There might be something painfully obvious that you are missing that someone else can spot right away.