Don’t Bury the Lead: Where Your Application Should Actually Start

If you only had five seconds of an assessor’s time, what would you want them to remember? That’s where your application should begin.

Most grant applications start in the same place: a heartfelt origin story, a paragraph about the organisation’s values, or a restating of the mission statement. It feels polite. It feels “right.” But it’s not effective.

If you want to write grant applications that stand out, you need to start strong. And that usually means starting somewhere else entirely.