Advocacy Funding - Bid writing, tender production, grant applications and service design for advocacy organisations

The Only Way You Should Ever Begin Your Advocacy Funding Bid

By Joe Roberson July 9, 2012

Open your bid with an explosion — Boom! You’ve got to start your bid with a bang.

What’s the most important part of your advocacy funding bid? What’s the one thing that will shape how your bid’s assessor rates the rest of it?

It’s how you begin it.

Because even in the world of bid writing first impressions matter most. A brilliant first impression casts the rest of your bid in a brilliant light. Whereas a dull opening condemns your reader to a duller experience, no matter how much your bid shines later on.

This massively affects your bid’s chances of being successful. [Read more…] about The Only Way You Should Ever Begin Your Advocacy Funding Bid

Twelve tried and tested ways to improve your advocacy organisation’s funding prospects (via eight Advocacy Leaders)

By Joe Roberson July 2, 2012

Advocacy Funding Prospects pic — Improve your funding prospects without having to go panning down the creek.

Maintaining your advocacy service and growing its funding is hard work.

Tenders are tougher than ever. Grant programmes become more competitive every month. To be successful there’s a lot of things to get right, and a lot of things you can get wrong.

But within the advocacy community there’s a lot of experience and good advice available on how to improve your funding prospects and make sure your hard work yields results. We’ve gathered some of the best of it here in the first of our ‘Ask the Community’ articles. We asked eight independent advocacy leaders:

“What’s your best advice for other advocacy organisations wanting to maintain and grow their funding?”

Here’s what they said… [Read more…] about Twelve tried and tested ways to improve your advocacy organisation’s funding prospects (via eight Advocacy Leaders)

Top 5 Reasons Why Advocacy Funding Bids Fail (and how to make sure yours doesn’t)

By Joe Roberson June 28, 2012

I’m sure you’ve experienced that crushing moment of rejection. Where you discover that the bid you pinned your last funding hopes on and worked so hard for has been turned down.

At worst you’ll be left facing the loss of a vital service. At best a roadblock to your plans to help more marginalised people be heard.

But there are some really achievable things you can do to reduce your chances of rejection. Based on the Big Lottery’s most common reasons for rejecting proposals, here’s what you can do to avoid becoming just another failure statistic. [Read more…] about Top 5 Reasons Why Advocacy Funding Bids Fail (and how to make sure yours doesn’t)

6 Hot Tips to Ease the Pain of Bid Writing

By Joe Roberson June 12, 2012

The pain of advocacy bid writing — Does bid writing make you feel like this?

You’ve got a fundraising strategy.

You’ve got good evidence that your project is needed and a list of funders to apply to.

You’ve checked their guidelines and you know that you fit them. You know your project and your approach. You know what questions you’ll need to answer.

You’re ready to go. All that stands between you and a world-beating bid is a blank page.

This is the hard part, where the pain starts.

But it doesn’t have to be so hard. And it can be less painful. There’s a pretty simple process you can go through that makes bid writing easier, helps you feel like you know what you’re doing, and saves you time. Here’s how. [Read more…] about 6 Hot Tips to Ease the Pain of Bid Writing

The A Team Guide to Being an Advocate

By Joe Roberson June 12, 2012

The A (Advocate) Team — Maybe you can hire… an Advocate

You may not have noticed it before but the A Team bear a surprising resemblance to a team of advocates. There’s a good reason for this. If you remember, they started out in 1972 before advocates really existed and the advocacy movement had got going. They hung around for a long time, doing a lot of good work, improving hundreds of people’s lives and inspiring thousands of viewers throughout the 1980s.

So it’s no coincidence that by the time they went off air in 1987 the advocacy movement had tentatively spread its wings and taken flight. It was on the move. Fair to say we owe a lot of our roots to Hannibal and the boys.

Let’s examine in more detail just how much the A Team inspired advocacy as we know it… [Read more…] about The A Team Guide to Being an Advocate