Enhance Electronic Signature Licitness for Applications in European Union

How to eSign a document: electronic signature licitness for applications in European Union

okay hi everyone uh we will wait one more minute for people to filter in welcome um and show a quick video enjoy that access europe helps irish civil society unlock and manage eu funding it's a support program run by the wheel providing information training help desk support and network building opportunities the european union's new multi-annual financial framework will run from 2021 to 2027 and contains a plethora of funding programs for organizations like yours these include education and training youth sport citizenship rights and equality research and innovation and the social economy these programs will serve the eu's overall objectives of being smarter greener more connected more social and closer to its citizens innovative projects undertaken by civil society will play a key role in driving these objectives but navigating eu funding can be challenging join access europe today for expert help with accessing eu funding opportunities [Music] so hello everyone again welcome i just share my screen or moment that was not right here we go okay so here we are uh hi welcome everyone joining us today for a training session on how to write ueu funding application my name is christina and i'm the european programs officer at the wheel and i'm happy to welcome you all here today together with my colleagues emma and emily and our two special guests mary moynihan from smashing times and from the northern and western regional assembly we are very happy to have you here today thanks for joining us we would of course also like to know who you are so please feel welcome to pop your name into the chat your organization where you are from so that we get an overview who is in the room thanks so much um just as a note in the beginning you already saw it we will record this event we will share the recording with you afterwards as well as all slides and links um just uh to mention this is a part of a series uh for an overview of how your funding works in general you're very welcome to watch back the trainings we did for example on all eu funding programs on how you go about designing your project on how you build a new partnership you will find all these recordings of all these events on our youtube channel and today we focus on writing your eu funding application um this is our agenda for today first will emma share with you what to consider before you actually start writing then is here from the northern and western regional assembly and he will tell us more about what evaluators look for in an application we will have a short break and afterwards emma will share grant writing best practices including the keyword method and then mary moynihan from smashing times will talk about her experiences and how she developed the project into a successful application we reserved also sometime in the end for q and a and we would like to encourage you to post your questions during during the sessions um during the session into the chat box either we will answer them directly in the chat or we will answer them in the q a session if you have a very individual question we would invite you to write an email to us and we are happy to respond um to you directly and individually also but now let's start and i hand over to emma great thank you so much christina and thank you everybody for joining us give me a moment now and i will share my slides um okay great she should be able to see them there now and i have to hide some of my little cameras because otherwise it blocks my slides so um as christina said this is the last installment in a series and you will be able to access all of the recordings uh afterwards we'll include them in our follow-up email and what we've what we've proposed throughout the the kind of three the three main sessions that we did we had a first overview session and then the three kind of focusing on developing a project sessions uh we use these kind of eight steps um and so you can see that so far what we've covered is in the in the first session designing your eu project we looked at steps one to four and then we did a whole session about step five which is building your partnership and in this um in this training we look at the last those last three steps and to get you to the point where you're ready to submit your application but i suppose it's important to note that this uh the grant writing process is not perfectly linear there are some things that we'll be kind of touching back on that we've covered in previous sessions and this is just you know we will we will mention a few of the things that we've covered uh so before we get right and i do want to kind of look back before we get to that step six of let's get writing we do i do want to kind of look back on a few things that you would have had to have just had in place uh in order to be ready for this for this uh step in the process um and just to note as well if you haven't seen those previous sessions don't worry about it as i said you'll get all of the recordings afterwards and this can still kind of function as a standalone session and that the advice is um is applicable whether you whether you were at the previous ones or not so let's just as i said have a very quick look at what you will need to have done before you reach this step and so what you need in order to be ready to start writing so the first thing is your your concept note is finalized with your partners with basic work work packages so um we talked about this during the design phase and you can watch back the the design your eu project session to learn lots more about concept notes and how you translate kind of an idea that you might have into an actual kind of solid outline for a project and separate it into some kind of work packages so this is done during that um design phase at the beginning you would have your own concept note where you came up with the idea you put it down on paper and then you use that to reach out to partners but as we as we covered during the building your partnership session it is good practice then to allow your partners to feed in and kind of give ideas and share their tips and what they'd like to see in the project so that you know it's more of a kind of collectively designed endeavor and so you know you need to allow time for all of your partners to kind of feed in but there has to be a point where you stop tweaking and you stop kind of adjusting and introducing new concepts and new ideas and there has to be a point where you know you say right okay everybody's had their say we've all had a chance to kind of weigh in and give our opinions this is the latest concept note are we all happy with this is it okay for me to get writing based on this concept note and hopefully all of your partners will say yeah absolutely go for it so the other thing that you need before you get writing is the relevant info from all of your partners so again you'll have done this during the partnership building phase so um as i said you can you can watch back and look at that we have we'll actually have a look at more detail about what is exactly is this information that you need from your partners uh we'll have a look at that in the next slide but this is something that you would have done earlier in the process and kind of gathering up all of that info from their partners because this is the info that you need to inform your writing so all of these are the things that you need before you you start that whole writing process definitely spend some time making some editable templates uh for the application for your budget for your gantt chart so this will completely depend on the program that you're applying for they all have different kind of application systems and budget structures some actually use word forms so programs like the serv program for example they often use words so you don't need to create a new template but others use kind of online portals like erasmus plus which can be difficult to work with and in that you know you can't leave comments or highlight things or you know it's it's not easy for partner multiple partners to work on it at the same time and so in which case you know you need to kind of well i would advise that you spend a bit of time making a good quality editable template on word or something like that that you can work with for the co-writing phase and then allocate time later on in the process to kind of copy and paste into their portal and so yeah so definitely it makes sense to spend some time making really good quality editable templates and because it'll make your life easier down the line than doing something that's a bit rough and then you know when you end up with a very long unwieldy document it can be difficult to deal with and the next thing is your rough timeline and budget uh you should also kind of have a a reasonable idea of this before you get writing and this can change obviously throughout the writing process you might decide as you're writing the project you might decide to kind of scale up or scale down an activity um or kind of adjust something here or there like that's absolutely normal as you're writing of course the more you kind of look think about and and explain an activity you're going to realize that maybe you overlooked little bits or pieces or actually this isn't you know this doesn't really make sense or we're going to move this to a different stage in the timeline of the project and that's totally fine um but it's good to have kind of that rough timeline and budget confirmed in your own head to kind of help steer your writing but also amongst your partners and just i suppose warn them that this is this is a proposed or the kind of first draft of the timeline and budget it might change uh depending how it depending on how the project shapes up but you know get general sign off that you know if i use this as my starting point and send you an updated one later are you happy with that and most of the time they'll say yeah that's no problem at all um so what i always do then as i'm actually writing the application this is just a little side tip when it comes to timelines and budgets and stuff like that i'll um you know if it says if there's something to do with specific dates like oh we launch a website in month six of the project i always just kind of highlight any of those details as i'm going along like dates or budgets or anything that's very specific um because then if i do need to come back and adjust them later on it's easy to do and it also means that i don't get tied up in those details as i'm writing and not you know you want to try and avoid things that are going to trip you up as you're writing and and you know you want to be able to kind of get it written and then come back and worry about those little details later so that's another thing and then at the end you'll have an you know once you've actually written the project and you've made all of your adjustments you can update your timeline and budget and send it around to your partners but having an original kind of idea of how it's going to go is probably the best way to go about it um the next thing you can do is use cloudway cloud-based software uh to call right and so i always use google drive but i know sometimes people use teams and dropbox and things like that and so this is definitely recommended because you don't particularly when you're working with multiple partners dealing with attachments to emails and you know looking at feedback from multiple different attachments is just a bit of a mess so if you can look at a cloud-based solution that can be best and so there are some things to consider before you get actually start writing once you have all of these firmed up you're kind of ready to get started um so uh the next thing as i said i did want to just kind of touch briefly on this uh you know what what info do you actually need from your partners to get started so this is you know you know i've mentioned this before throughout this series it's not um an absolute exact science uh but this is what i always kind of look for when i'm building partnerships with project for with with partners or applying for projects together first thing i look for is just general partner information and this is pretty standard most of them who have been involved in european projects will even have you know document with all of this easily to hand and but you need to look at your background you need some information about who are they as an organization their aims their objectives kind of a general overview any relevant activities that they have that are relevant to this project and their track records of whether it's eu funding or other projects um staff profiles can be really good i usually try to include a staff profile of two to three relevant people who would actually be involved in this project if it was funded and who would be you know involved in in managing it and and then relevant eu info so this can depend on the programs but you know you might see oh oh id numbers are pick numbers so oid numbers are organizational id numbers when you register your organization for eu funding you'll get an oid number they used to be called pick participant identification codes um at the moment when you log in you can see both of them you can see your oid number and your pick number so um you know all of that information should be to hand if they're registered and and sometimes the program uh sometimes the application asks for any of their kind of past projects so like uh codes to their past projects and things like that so and that's the kind of general background information that you need uh that's asked for explicitly in the application so you'll be able to see exactly what you need from them uh in order to be able to fill that into the application so what i usually do is create a template and ask them to fill it out with all of this information so that i can then uh kind of copy and paste it or transfer it over to kind of the one application document that i'm looking for and if you're using the cloud-based thing as well i suppose they could copy and paste it directly in themselves um the next thing that i always look for is project specific information and so this is where you kind of get them to do a little bit of research and get them to do a little bit of work into you know what the situation is nationally so um i usually put together kind of a template of maybe maybe 10 questions where i kind of ask them about what's the national context in relation to this project here so recently i wrote a project about social enterprise so i you know i asked about what's the social enterprise ecosystem in their country what's available in terms of supports to social enterprise is there cut is there other initiatives that are um that are available in your country that this that this project could potentially complement what are the needs of social enterprises in your country and then i looked at specific expertise and relevance so how would they as partners what expertise do they have in this area in this case it's a social enterprise but it can be whatever your topic is on how are they going to add value how are they going to make sure that the results of this project are sustainable in their country and you know what are they going to do to add to the and what kind of impact can they guarantee you know in their own national context and then the other thing of course is their reach and their network and their capacity so you know if they were to be if they were to join this project what you know are they part of any networks how will they disseminate it how many people do they reach throughout their work um you know even things like how many people tend to attend their events or you know sign up to newsletters or social media and things like that so you have to get a bit of a picture of how they will you know how they will disseminate the project and what network they have because then all of this information makes it easy for you to talk about it once you have all of that you can then talk about it in the application confidently and kind of make sure that throughout the application and you're kind of sprinkling in these details at all points and to show that i suppose it's a cohesive project that all the partners have done their research all the partners have you know done a bit of a an audit about what's available nationally and they're thinking strategically about how they're going to use the project so all of this information can be really handy and for you then as the project writer to be able to weave it in um so that's the the general kind of info that you need from your partners and so you've kind of covered all of those main things that you need before you get writing so you need your concept note you need your relevant info you need to have a good template you need to have your rough timeline and budget and you need to have some kind of cloud-based software in order to write to co-write together in an easy way the next thing to do right before you get writing is to make sure that you have a very close look at the evaluation criteria uh of the project um so just to bear in mind that you know every call every eu funding call will include a kind of section on the evaluation criteria so you can see very clearly and they're very transparent about how they're going to evaluate your project and what they're looking for and how many marks are available for for which type of for for which part of the evaluation so a very typical uh kind of criteria that you'd see would be things like relevance quality and impact and they'll tell you how many how many points are available for each of those and you know how it's weighted throughout the different ones we'll have a little look at relevance now in a minute but um what you need to be thinking of is how do you specifically demonstrate that you are addressing these criteria throughout your application so you can see that i have this wonderful image here of this of this fruitcake so when you're making a fruitcake you don't want to just sprinkle the fruit on top as an afterthought the idea is that it should be evenly dispersed throughout your uh throughout your cake in this instance but it's the same with the valuation criteria and when it comes to writing your project you want to make sure that it's evenly dispersed throughout your application that you're constantly coming back to why is this relevant how are you going to focus on quality how are you going to focus on impact that you know that's kind of unavoidable throughout your application or that there's a little bit of it in every bite of your application if we're going to stick with our cake metaphor and or whatever other obviously evaluation criteria you want to just make it the point is to try and make it easy for the evaluator to give you points they're reading your whole application looking for the relevance looking for the quality looking for the impact so you want to try and make it easy for them to do that um i have a you know reviewed applications before where and it's kind of obvious that the person hasn't read the evaluation criteria because for example in in some programs they'll they'll give specific points for things like dissemination how are you going to communicate the project and promote the project and kind of embed it locally and stuff like that so this is your things like your websites your social media your newsletter your events your outreach uh your collaboration with what are called multipliers like people who could help to multiply the impact of your project and they specifically say you know we have you know 20 points to give to this thing um and what i find them when i'm reviewing to the application the application is that they've barely kind of answered this question at all they've barely said anything about dissemination and when i ask them you know you know are you going to do do you have dissemination plans for this project like things like websites and social media they're always like oh yeah yeah of course we do that we do that with every project but you know they didn't mention it in the application they kind of assumed that it was a given and they were so focused on the the kind of goods of the project the real um subject matter that they they kind of neglected to mention dissemination because to them it's like oh yeah of course we do that but this would be a huge mistake because the evaluator is looking for dissemination throughout the project it's one of the core evaluation criteria so you know they can't give you points for something that's not there even if it's something that you would definitely have done they can't give you the points if it's not there so very important to read the event evaluation criteria and make time to to make sure that you give time and pay attention in your application not just to the stuff that you deem as important you know the innovation in the project or the value of it or the impact it will have but what they think is important what the evaluator has said that they want to see in your application so that's very important and i highlighted relevance there because i want to come back on that i i did you know touch on this in designing and designing your eu project session that we ran earlier so i won't go back over it in huge detail but it is important so i just wanted to touch on it again so when decided you know when we were talking about designing the project we were looking at how do you decide whether to go for a project or not whether it's a good fish for your organization so at all times it's about weighing up whether there's a good overlap between your strategic objectives as an organization and the strategic objectives of the funder and if it's all about the funders priorities and there's nothing really in it for you uh it's a waste of your time it's not going to have any impact if it's all about your priorities and there's no clear connection to the funders priorities then again it's a waste of your time because they'll see through that and they won't fund it and so a perfect funding opportunity is one where you can easily demonstrate the connection between how this is going to benefit your organization and how it's going to deliver on the objectives of the program so it's that kind of sweet spot in the middle and it should be a no-brainer you shouldn't have to stretch and kind of justify why this is applicable um but remember you know i put that little asterisk in at the end there because remember it's their investment and in the actual application itself as much as you know internally you're going to be weighing up the funders priorities versus your priorities and making that decision when you're writing the application remember that this is their money and it's what's in it for them of course you're going to say obviously this is very strategically aligned with our organization and it would be a very exciting opportunity and all that kind of stuff that's grant but throughout your application you're bringing it back again and again to their priorities what's in it for them how are you going to help them to deliver on the purpose of the of the program so um you know it is their money you want to make sure that you know they're the ones that are taking the risk you want to make it kind of what i always kind of say is abundantly and unavoidably clear that this project will deliver on the key objectives of this fund and it will be highly impactful and it will be high quality and whatever else they ask for in the scoring criteria you want to make that really really clear to them and and don't be subtle about it you know sometimes people kind of say it once they just kind of allude to us at the beginning and then they kind of go off and explain the whole project and they never really return to it again um but again you don't want to be subtle for something that's so important you know the relevance the the how it's going to deliver for them and how it's going to be such an excellent investment for them to make you you want to make it very very clear throughout the application how this is going to to bring come back to the to the purpose to the um to the core objectives of the funding call and you have to remember that they have dozens if not hundreds of applications to review so you want to you know evaluators are people too you know they want it you want to make it easy for them you want to make their job easy by by bringing it back making it clear and and making it easy for them to give you the marks um because they're they're very transparent they tell you exactly what they're going to be looking for and how many points is available for each section so they've kind of made it abundantly clear to you now as the grant writer you're making their lives easier by showing them again and again you know i'm i'm look i'm i'm giving you what you're looking for i'm making it easy for you to see what i what i'm proposing here um but with that when we talk about evaluators are people too uh let's um let's hand over to evaluators so we're very um we're very lucky to have here who's the eu projects officer at the northern and western regional assembly which is the contact point for um a couple of different interreg programs i think uh patrick you'll be able to correct me there but um yeah patrick is going to give us a little bit of the kind of insight into what it's like from the other side of the other side of the house i suppose as somebody who's evaluating an assessing applications and making making decisions about whether they're a good investment for the funding that they're responsible for so patrick i'm going to stop share and i'm going to hand over to you because i know you have a few slides that you want to share yeah thank you emma um can you see the full screen there yeah we can okay yeah hello everyone um as emma said i am my name is from the northern western regional assembly um our headquarters is in balboa drain and county of us common and we're one of three regional assemblies uh in ireland so we've been up there's another southern regional assembly it's based in waterford and the eastern midland regional assembly is based in ballymond in dublin and i suppose each of the regional assemblies are national contact points for different programs um so i am the national contact point for enter egg northern periphery antarctic program and also the atlantic area program and together along the southern regional assembly we share the national contact point for android europe projects so what i would say is my i suppose um presentation and uh tips for for writing projects um from the perspective of the evaluators are my views and tips are very much shipped by enteric program so i'm conscious that there's lots of other eu programs that you'll be looking at but i think a lot of the advice and tips are common across most programs so so the first thing i would say is to unless the the this is not to put people off um projects you know our my job is really to to try and promote where the green jersey in terms of getting irish organizations to apply and be successful and then trig um programs but one thing i do i think and emma touched on there it's very important to instead of diving and thinking that you can get funding it's very important to do your research and make sure that what you're what your your organization and what the problem you're trying to solve aligns to the program and i think that's very important um to do that so to to to and usually when you go on the website and you see if there's a call that they'll explain what the the thematic objective of the program is um so i'll give you an example would be uh northern prophet arctic program is very much focused on say the the northern western uh part of ireland but along with greenland iceland norway finland and sweden and working with them to to solve um problems and it's very much the the clue is in the name i suppose in terms of uh northern periphery and arctic it's like rural peripheral regions so challenges faced by people that live in and sparsely populated areas the other programming responsible for is atlantic area and again that's um all of ireland is eligible for that but it's very much focused on the projects are based around um problems that i can serve the sea and marine life and ports and stuff like that there so i think it's very important to check that your project and what you're aiming to do fits with the proposal or what the program theme and the policy and the specific objectives and i'll touch on later on what i mean by that um secondly um the work packages that you're developing as part of the project you want to make sure that they're laying to the the document and that's something that the evaluators will be looking at um throughout it and generally uh in enteric projects as well you you'll have a mix of different partners from different regions in europe and each of them will have to bring in something to the table or different value but so for example a lot of ventrac projects you see a university you might see a civil society organization and you might see a public authority and so say for example the the civil society organization might be bringing the connection or the network with the uh citizens or businesses or something like that there and the university is bringing expert knowledge and then the public authority would be bringing the the policy element to it so um it's very much this was important to uh that one that your work package aligns with um what you're trying to do but also explain what value you're bringing to the project um is it as your type of organization a good fit i think this is important and this and then trade you you'll hear this thing called quadruple helix model and basically means is the projects ideally should have this mix of a government body such as like a county council um a university or institute of technology and then community which could be like a civil society organization or a charity and then an industry and so like private organizations but when i say private sometimes actually we find that a lot of like um something like a chamber of commerce or some sort of like non-profit body is actually the kind of representing industry because they have a network of businesses um that they're bringing they will have stakeholders um and then the last point to make here is how can the project add value to your organization and how can you add value to the project so i think that's very important when you're writing the application you want to show how your organization is adding value to the project partnership but the same time you obviously i think it's ultimately it's almost a waste of your time if you're being involved in these projects if it can't add value to what your mission is and what your organization does um an example of um a policy alignment that i referred to is so for example denture ignore the perfect arctic program that has a number of priorities and the first one is strengthening the innovation capacity for resilient and attractive npa communities so this is the priority and then under this priority they have three specific objectives so this is an example of what when your project in the application phase you'll need to select one of these specific objectives and that really is really important because everything you write in the application really needs to align to to what this is and then if you look at the the program manual or the terms of the call you'll see that um [Music] for example the looking here at 1.3 for example about sustainable growth and competitiveness for smes one of the output indicators or results this they'll have suggested um output indicators but they might be that you engaged with a number of smes or you held a number of workshops or you helped help businesses develop new products or export or something so it's very important to bear that in mind that the outputs of the your project link back to the specific objective um and just sorry i should that's just a touch on the within intrigue um the funding is all dictated by this thing called a cohesion policy and and as some of you might be familiar with that the european funding runs in seven year cycles so the the last one was the 2014-2020 period we're now in the 2021 to 2027 period and these are the five policy objectives that all and trade programs and any um what we call european territorial cooperation programs are based upon and you'll find that most eu programs are linked to one or two of these policy objectives so it's very important to bear that in mind and your application as well when you're writing it um the internet when you're applying for as you say i think research is so important before you dive into a project and start writing or start looking for project partners it's very important that you study the program manual and the terms of the call and just to see if you're a good fit um the interreg programs have different co-financing requirements so for example enteric northwest europe is at sixty percent and trade northern perfect arctic is 65 and atlantic area is 75 so the different and then different programs have different co-financing rates and it's very much very important to identify with this early on discuss it with management and internally how you're going to co-finance the project but for example in the interreg projects quite often the co the co-financing rate is actually um your your own staff resources and time so a lot of the enter egg programs a significant part of the budget is made up of staff so if for example you have a total budget of say a hundred thousand you will be eligible for the costs in terms of you'll be paying your staff anyway but at the end of the six months or the year whenever the reporting periods you'll be submitting that claim um for the cost and then if the co-financing rate by the program is 65 percent is say for example an intrigue npa you'll get 65 percent of the of the staff cost that you submitted back so your your your co-financing the program by 35 but realistically if you're if it's your own staff you would have had those staff costs anyway so that's what we mean by co-financing but that that's in the case of entering different like different programs like horizon europe and all different have all sorts of different co-financing models so it's very important to understand that before you apply um does the legal status of your organization meet the requirements to be a partner or lead partner i think this is kind of important um i suppose if you to generally to lead an trade program you need to be a public body um but also that's something the evaluators will be looking at is the legal status of your of your organization um so if you're say for example a non-profit um you might be limited by guarantee or you might be a dac or you might be a clg or something like that there and something like a dac is not a european way thing so sometimes it might be worth explaining put in a line or two to explain what that is um i think this is something maybe the evaluators are looking for is the liquidity of a business or another well an organization sorry so that they know that because essentially you're having to bankroll the project for a year until you claim back the cost so it's very important that you're able to convince the evaluators in the application that your organization is capable of doing that and then the last point is just that research understand what the work packages and deliver deliverables should be and then it aligns to the um project objectives and the theme of the program as well um just some small homemade for time emma okay yeah um okay write an application um what is the problem you're trying to solve i think that was really really important and i i would have made this mistake before where you you try you lose sight of what the problem you're trying to solve um and evaluators can kind of see this if you're almost applying just for the sake of trying to get funding or something the problem you're solving really needs to align to what um the the theme of the program and the specific objective so it's very important to bear that in mind right throughout the application um and explain and explain why you need the project to solve the problem as well that's very important um explain why transnational cooperation enables you to solve the problem and achieve the results so again enter egg is a short for inter-regional so entreg is really focused on the interregional knowledge exchange process so each entry program has a partnership made up of yourself and other partner organizations and other regions across europe so it's very important to demonstrate why you need to be part of that cooperation and that partnership and that's the only way that you can really solve the problem that you're trying to do through the project so an example might be that you might have a network of businesses that you work with or volunteers or something like that there and you have you have the network but you don't have the the technical knowledge to try and solve a problem but by being in a partnership that has a university the university say in another country like finland or spain or something they're bringing the expert knowledge so it's very important to convey what you need to be part of a transnational cooperation in terms of to solve the problem make sure the work packages are realistic i suppose as emma was saying their the evaluators do have a good bit of experience they know what is realistic and achievable and it's very tempting to probably over promise when you're writing applications because you're you really want to succeed but be careful not to over promise and then be not be able to deliver when it actually comes to the project um who are the key stakeholders and in trade programs stakeholders are really important because you usually have to set up some sort of stakeholder group that you're working with nationally in ireland a lot of them trade programs have a budget for you to travel to other parts other partner regions so generally you'll be taking stakeholders with you um but the you demonstrating that you have a good relationship with stakeholders in ireland is actually quite important to to to demonstrate an application because evaluators will want to know um that you're able to deliver the project so for example you might need to have a good relationship with the county council or some government body or something like that there or another state agency um to be able to so you have to demonstrate that as well um who's your target audience and how will the party who will the project benefit so is it citizens is it smes or is it a combination of both um give your plenty give yourself plenty of time to identify project partners and this is probably one of the most time consuming and challenging things and then trade developing and trade projects is building the partnership and identifying the right partners and it's very much like a 18 matchmaking process and in the project as well you want to explain the long term impact so generally and trade projects are between three to four years but the evaluators will expect you to show that the the impact of the project will outlive the actual project itself so it'll have a long-term impact um and explain the value for money as well that's something that's part that's usually a very important part of the assessment criteria in all the projects um other considerations just are irrelevant of eu national and local policies you don't need to be an expert but it's good to do a bit of research and if you're able to show that what you're doing through the project is kind of helping to work toward towards the objectives of these policies um that usually kind of scores your points and ticks a few boxes um so it's important to be it's no harm in sighting things like um like for this current program the eu they have a thing called the eu green deal it's all about becoming hard to become um a low carbon or net zero carbon economy um you know by 2050 so that's a huge high level objective for the eu but that also becomes a national objective and also becomes an objective for the the county and city councils in ireland so it's very important for for you to explain how your project achieves that um include references to as i said things like european policies but even things right down to like the local economic and community plans and every county and city in ireland has a local economic and community plan get in touch with the national contact point they tend to have a lot of expertise and we'll give you a lot of tips sometimes and they'll give you advice about writing the application as well and the other thing which is most programs tend to have a like a directory a list of previously approved projects and it's worth looking for that on them for inspiration but also it gives you an idea of why they were successful um in the past um and just quickly to say these are kind of the interreg programs that are open to irish organizations so at the top you have entered europe that covers all of europe um so you they it's usually partnerships of say like seven to ten or sometimes even eleven or twelve partners and there's a current call open throughout the minute and try again pa as i said the the other three projects their programs at the bottom then are what we call transnational so they have a specific geography so and trig npa is a good portion of ireland um and then things like countries like greenland iceland norway finland and sweden and the faroe islands and northwest europe is all of ireland and parts of bit as you can imagine northwest europe france and parts of belgium um and then android atlantic area is all basically atlantic area from ireland right down to spain uh sorry france spain and portugal um and now we don't know when uh that call will be launched but it'll probably be more likely the end of the summer um at this stage but those are a few um and there's a link to the website if you want to go on and find out more information about the calls um i don't know if anyone any questions or will i leave the questions so emma you said they might be in the chat is it yeah well i suppose we can if there are any questions we will have allocated time for questions later on in the call and if patrick if you're available hang around and questions come in um then we compose them to you then um but uh if you're not available don't worry we can just send people your way with your email address and so yeah and if there i have i can't see anything coming in now so i'd say we're probably all right we can wait until later i can hang about dinner with any questions that's brilliant thank you so much patrick and that was just excellent and just comes back to um i think that the focusing on the problem and the gaps and stuff like that that was something we talked about during the designing your eu project phase in terms of looking at what is the problem what is your proposed solution and what impact would it have kind of thing and i suppose the other thing to note is that you know all of those factors um oh we somebody's asking can you have a copy of the slides absolutely all slides will be shared afterwards so that's no problem but just in terms of all of those um you know those things that they have to think about like policy and value for money and why this needs to be an eu funded project you know why it should be transnational all of those things and they're all you know very very important points but i think in fairness to evaluators and to the programs they do ask you all of those things in the application you don't have to try and remember it all you know they'll clearly ask you and we'll have a look at an example question now you know they do give you a lot of hints about what they want to see like when they ask why does this project have to be transnational they give you some kind of hints about you know things that you might say and stuff like that so i suppose it's not like you have a completely blank slate going in there when you're writing the project the the programs do ask you specifically what they want to see and they do give you a lot of information and things like that and so that's important to know as well that you won't have to try and uh you know the the application itself will steer you in the right direction and as long as you answer the questions properly i suppose um so that's great thank you so much patrick i really appreciate that and you were you were bang on time as well so i think this is the first time we've been as good to schedule so let's try and keep it up i do think we're going to take a 10-minute break now because we're going to get into the next section now in a little bit which is the actual kind of practical tips for just good writing kind of across the board in grants but specifically a little bit tailored more to eu grants and so we're going to go get into that uh very shortly and then we're going to have a um a case study from an organization that are very successful at writing you funded projects and so we look at that shortly but i do think we we had a quick poll that we wanted to do before we went so i don't know emily if you want to hop in and we'll leave the poll up and everybody can vote and we can share the results afterwards so it just asks how much grant writing experience eu or otherwise do you have um or maybe we can we can share the results now because i think we have time where you know as i said i'm not used to running so well to schedule um we see what comes up and then we can take a proper 10 minute break and let people have a little bit of a walk and a breather um so anybody else now is your chance to vote i can see there's a few left um okay i think is that all of them yeah okay we'll end the poll now and we can share the results so i think you can see there that about 48 have no no grant writing experience yet uh 42 percent have some grand writing experience and 10 have lost so we have a nice mixture there in the room we're pitching this more beginner but hopefully there'll be something for everybody even those of you that have lots and you'll be able to it'll be a nice refresher for you so look as i said we'll get into the proper um you know actual tips for for good writing uh shortly did i share the results properly yeah i did um okay there you go you can see the results um but yeah we we dive into the next section after the break but for now we're going to take a quick 10 minute break so i think we can all come back at 11 if you're happy with that um so we'll be back at 11 make sure you get up have a bit of a stretch and we'll see you back here shortly okay thanks everyone [Music] [Music] this uh hi everyone you're very welcome back um i think we can i think we can all what time is it now it's bang on 11 so i think we can get started with the next part of the session i see that there is a couple of questions for patrick we will get to them during the q a session um so just bear with us but we're going to go straight on soon as we're on schedule we will keep going on to the next part of today's session and i'm gonna have to stop here and share again uh which is about i suppose the um the actual process of some good grant writing tips and tricks and so just bear with us for one second while i share okay so um before the break we looked at all of the different kind of things you need to have arranged before you get the do the process of kind of getting writing and i'm sorry one second um sorry there's a bit of background noise there um okay so we looked at everything that you need to do in order to get writing and so now we're going to look at some of the tips and tricks that you need during the writing process so the first thing to look at is the general eu grant writing rules so these are just some kind of in no particular order these are things to remember when you're writing eu grants so the first thing that we're going to look at is the european dimension so this is what we talk about in terms of justifying you know why does this project need to be eu funding why can't you get it funded nationally what is the value to having it at eu level if it is like most projects require partnership most eu funded projects require some level of partnership so um if there is you know if it's one of those projects that require partnership what's the value of the partnership why why do this at eu level so we will look at um at kind of that european dimension and as well as that uh i suppose the um the kind of connection with eu policy um how you're going to reach a an eu audience and and kind of ensure impact around the eu so we will look at that in closer detail in the next slides but just to be aware that that is key throughout when you're writing in an eu funded project the other thing that we've touched on before is the whole it's not about you things so we i touched on that before the break i won't keep going on about it but just remember that you know it is their money it's about their priorities their goals how you're going to help them reach their objectives and the only reason i keep kind of mentioning this is because i've reviewed applications where organizations have kind of have written at length about the impact that this is going to have for them and for their organization and that's great you should definitely mention that but remember that front and center are their priorities and how you're going to help them so just remember that the next thing is one that i i say all the time this you might have heard of it before this kiss principle so keep it simple strip it or keep it stupid simple depends on um on which definition you look up of that acronym but um basically the other mistake that i see people doing as their writing projects is they kind of get over excited and they think oh you know we'll add this and we'll add that and oh wouldn't it be great if we did this um if you remember before the break we looked at and when we're in the designing the eu project phase you know you go to your partners with a very solid idea uh if you don't have a solid idea when you go to your partners then it can become a little bit of a free-for-all and everybody throws in their objectives and then you don't have a cohesive project so you start with a very solid idea that is well thought out and you do that by filling out a concept note and we can forge you on we you know we've talked about it at length in previous sessions so we won't we won't keep explaining it here but we'll include the template for that in the follow up and you'll be able to use it you know it's just a general tool you can create your own one as well but it encourages you to put structure onto your project so um you know you want to have a really good solid project when you go to your partners then you want to allow for a little bit of flexibility not a free-for-all but a little bit of flexibility in terms of their ideas and suggestions and then you want to have a final concept note which is what you base your project writing off of try and stick to that of course there's going to be a little bit of flexibility as you're writing and you're realizing oh maybe that timeline doesn't work or maybe we'll push that forward in the project or actually that doesn't make sense or you know we don't really have time to do that in this project that's totally normal um but what you want to avoid is going a bit mad as you're writing the project and adding in bits and pieces or getting over excited about the funding opportunity in general and designing this big monster of a project that is way too ambitious that can't really be delivered in the time frame or for that budget but i think people sometimes they see a funding opportunity and it's so bang on what they want to do that they feel like this is their their only opportunity to shove in all of their objectives into this one project and i would say that's a mistake keep it simple keep your project concept simple and straightforward don't over complicate it resist the urge to start adding extra things and bells and whistles and things like that keep your concept straight forward achievable what i always say is ambitious but achievable it should it should challenge you a little bit but not completely um you know overwhelm you to be able to deliver this project um and remember that a project can just be the first step in an overall kind of strategy to continue it so you know maybe your your goal is to create a kind of one-stop shop all you know all-inclusive service for you know um for people who are excluded from employment well you're not going to get all of that in one project so what's the first thing you need to do and and do a project based on that and then be strategic and you can even explain in your application how this is just the first step in our overall ambition you know later down the line we'd be looking to expand on different areas and add new projects and you know this might be something that develops over five years or ten years but try to resist the urge to shove everything into one project because that's a mistake that i think people make very frequently is feeling like they have to that they either feel like they have to over complicate it and add all of these things in order for it to be impressive or they feel it's their only chance and that they you know they need to show everything they've ever wanted into this one funding proposal and the the other mistake that i see people making a lot is not being specific enough um about you know for everything you need to have but for everything you need to have sources and and support and evidence but you also need to if you say that you're going to do something be specific about it and where we look at that in more detail it's that it's that uh understanding the whole picture like invoking your inner toddler it's kind of the same thing as in you know who what why where you know like all of those questions you need to imagine that there's some you know little kid beside you going and who's going to do that and why are you doing that and when are we going to do that and how much is that going to be well toddler wouldn't ask that but you know this these are the kind of questions that you need to ask yourself and to be as specific as possible and when it comes to things like target groups the mistake that i often see is people saying oh we're going to target young people and it's like well okay young people from the eu's definition that's everything from about 12 to 30 so that's not a very specific target group and you know where are these people coming from where you know what's their what specific type of people another one i saw was people saying oh people experiencing homelessness again like that that's a huge cohort of people your project should be specifically targeting a group of people and you should demonstrate why these people specifically need this support and how you're going to reach them and how you have a unique access to them or a unique understanding of of their issue or their problems and how you can how your proposal is going to help so the more specific you can be about your target group and about your kpis that's the other thing like we will hold an event but that's great but like how many people and and when and you know what's the impact is it going to be so the one thing i see people shying away from is setting kpis they don't want to push kind of exact numbers on things because then you're kind of committed to it but from the funders perspective you have to imagine like if you say oh we're going to have an event and we're going to aim to reach people in in this area like from their perspective how do they know if it's a good investment this could be 10 people it could be 100 people they have no idea because you haven't given them any indication so how do they know that's a good value how do they know that's a good investment if you're not going to give them a bald park figure um so i think sometimes people kind of shy away from kpis but it's essential that's that's how they know whether this project is uh kind of appropriate for the funding that it's requesting and so again it's not being um ambitious but realistic um you know and the best thing to do is kind of under shot a little bit look at what you'd be confident that you can get undershot a little bit and then you know if you get more great they're going to be delighted but you're not going to be overly pushing yourself um the other thing is read and answer the question uh this is the this kind of always gives me flashbacks to my leaving cert days because i think teachers were always kind of blue in the face telling us to read the question and answer the question we look at that in a little bit more detail we look at this keyword method in a moment that really kind of helps i think with that situation particularly with eu funded projects where you know as i said to patrick earlier they do give you a lot of hints about what they want to see in the answer to your question their questions are very comprehensive but they can also be a bit overwhelming because they ask for a lot of stuff so we'll have a look at that uh in a moment and we've we've looked at invoking your inner talker you know asking those questions having it clear that's not just about i suppose well in a sense it is about reassuring the funders that that you have thought about these details of who and when and where and what and how and all of those things that's all important and it reassures the wonder that like okay these people really know what they're doing they've thought about everything it's in good hands there's no ambiguity here but it's also good for yourself in case you get the funding and then you actually have to deliver it if you haven't thought about those things um you're going to be quite overwhelmed once the project kicks off because you know none of that has been defined um so yeah as much the more clarity you can give at application stage the better for the funder and that they're confident you've thought of all these things and the better for you down the line and then using reputable sources and quoting their own policy back at them so i suppose um you know you if you're saying that something is a problem and there's an issue or that you believe that this approach will work to in order to tackle this specific problem you should have reputable sources to back it up i mean your word on its own is is probably not going to be good enough there should be some evidence as to why you believe that your approach will work so use those reputable sources at all times and then as as patrick said kind of tying it in with their own policy and we'll have a look at that now actually in the next slide when we talk about that kind of eu dimension because sometimes people are a little bit unsure about okay well how do you kind of tie in the policy and you know that that can seem a little bit intimidating if you haven't done it before but i'll show you how easy it can be so just looking in general at the eu dimension so read the document it will refer to the relevant eu policy and it will provide a rationale for why the eu is providing this funding so when when we talk about you know all of those tips that patrick is giving and all of those tips that i've given there you know they do help you they're all there they're all in the call document they're all in the application they try and make it as easy for you as possible when we talk about oh make sure that you're quoting the relevant eu policy that can sound very intimidating but it's all there it's in the call document and we'll show you that now in a minute about how actually easy it is to do that and provide the eu context not just the irish context so if you remember from before the break when i was saying you know you need to get the um information from your partners um like you know what's the story in their country how is this going to meet their needs so that kind of thing you know what often what i see in applications is um oh and in ireland we do and in ireland this would be really good in ireland and it's like this shouldn't be an eu project because you know the person writing it obviously just wants this funding for their community in ireland so you need to constantly kind of bring it back to how it's going to impact all of your partners so you have a little bit of that eu context and then kind of over pin everything with that eu policy and you know how it fits in with overall eu goals and so you want to try and avoid it being too kind of irishy when you're writing an eu funded application uh ensure pan european dissemination so it can be all about the impact that's going to have here in ireland you need to ensure that um not only will you and your partners disseminate it in your respective countries but you will also um look at how you can make sure that wider europe benefits from these approaches or from your learnings and a really good way to do this is to um partner to join eu networks many of them are free so um i've said this before at many different trainings i'm sure many of you have heard it but there is an eu network for everything the wheel used to be part of a european network of network associations called n e n n a so that's a that's an example there is an eu network for everything and many of them are very happy to help disseminate kind of results of projects so the more you can think about how are we going to reach all of europe with this and do like something simple like bringing in a kind of stakeholder partner or associated partner who you know they don't necessarily get funding but they you know they can help you with dissemination and help provide feedback uh on pilots and things like that can really help to you know to demonstrate that this is an eu project um explain this project why this project should be eu rather than just nationally funded so i think i've i've i've touched on that before but it's shared you know you're talking about things like well you know there's opportunities for shared learning and innovation whether it's around a specific region in the case of interrupt or whether it's pan-european in the case of other programs and it's a connection it's got a connection to eu policy if we operate at eu level we're going to have a much increased impact you know it's these are all quite kind of logical things but these are the kinds of things that you'll be mentioned to justify that eu dimension and then there's potential for broad eu impact and further development so we have potential to to work together to deliver to deliver a model or to develop a model or an approach or a set of practices or an output of some kind that we can then disseminate throughout the eu maybe with the help of a network partner like the network of network associations for example um or a relevant partner to the topic of your project uh or maybe one of your partners one of your your full project partners you know is part of one of these networks or has a a big eu network whatever it is you have this broad potential for broad eu impact and maybe you know as i said before maybe this project is just the first step and you know the next project will look at bringing in even more partners so these are all just tips for how you know when we talk about that eu dimension and how do we justify this as an eu project these are the kinds of things that they're looking for it's the policy it's the the pan-european context it's the eui dissemination it's the benefits of eu collaboration in terms of learning and impact and it's the potential for for even further eu impact down the road if you if you mention all of those things you will have addressed the eu context but uh i did say that you know when we talked about linking to eu policy that can be a bit intimidating uh in terms of how do i do that and i don't necessarily know about all these different eu policies and you know there's millions of view policies how do i even get started well it is actually very easy as i said to patrick they give you loads of hits in the in the call document and they tell you exactly what they want to hear from you and they ask you specifically in your in the application you know how uh how what they want to see from you in order to give you points so for example i just took a random example this is a call that's open now it's for proposals to protect and promote the rights of the child that's a little screenshot from the um funding and tenders portal the eu funding attenders portal and it's through the serve program so these are all little screenshots shots further down the screen you can see a section of the scope where of the scope of the call where it says and if they tell you right here and now this call for proposals will contribute to the implementation of recommendations of the eu strategy for the rights of the child so that's the policy that they want you to tie your project in but you can look for more information by clicking on that call document and then you when you re