Issue #30 August 2013
Grant and Award Submissions - how to achieve 95% success!
At Balfour Consulting, we have a proven track record in preparing successful grant and award submissions, with an outstanding success rate across the board. In the last 10 years, we have written 27 award submissions with 26 of those going on to become finalists and 18 winning their category, with judgement pending for two entries.
So, in the past 10 years we have only failed once to get our clients into the finals and, to be fair, it was one of three submissions from one client to the same set of awards, with the two other submissions getting through to the finals.
And this is not including the 14 awards won by Balfour Consulting over the last decade!
We are particularly proud of the work we did recently with Tec-NQ, putting together their successful $2 million grant application to Regional Development Australia to support the development of an accommodation facility for the College. This is one of five successful grants we have completed over the past two and half years.
What is our secret? Sadly, we can’t give away our secrets but it has a lot to do with communication, strategy and research. It has very little to do with luck! So, if you need support to put together a successful award submission or grant application, you need to contact Balfour Consulting.
The basics of community engagement
Community engagement may involve some or all of social research, community consultation, community and organisational engagement, stakeholder management and communication programs.
We work to help clients listen and talk to communities by providing expert services in community consultation and public participation, facilitation of groups, meetings and events and strategic communications.
An exciting aspect of community engagement is the opportunity to reach out and engage with groups of people who traditionally do not engage in public. Likewise, the opportunity to engage with groups of people who are highly motivated and passionate about an issue or area - hearing their perspectives and working with them to build understanding to help create change can also be very rewarding.
Effective community engagement and communication needs to be grounded on:
- Understanding stakeholders, their needs and aspirations, and committing to being part of an authentic dialogue
- Being open, honest and transparent in all communications and in the way issues, questions and concerns are managed
- Communicating in a language that is easy to understand
- Using techniques and approaches that are appropriate for the audience
- Resisting the temptation to ‘sell’ the project and message.
Today, online engagement and increasingly, social media such as Facebook and twitter, are providing new media for engaging with the community, especially young people.
Using other technologies, such as interactive voting technology, has also brought a new rigour and dimension to community engagement, providing robust and transparent outcomes.
So you should feel comfortable asking for your community engagement to deliver stakeholder buy-in, effective ongoing communications and tangible, targeted outcomes.