Unlocking the Power of Online Signature Legality for Sport Organisations in the European Union

How to eSign a document: online signature legality for Sport organisations in European Union

i went and i went through the partner specific or um or information that you would need uh last week um and how you should kind of make your partners do a little bit of work to feed into the application and do a bit of their own research so it things like their national contract context the reach and the network that they have that you can then disseminate to through your project and then um specific skills and relevance how they will add value sustainability so this is all the kind of information that you need and once you have that and you are ready to write but you need to make sure to know what the evaluators are looking for first so just one second um so mistake people make is focusing on expressing their project idea and what they like about the project and what's kind of in it for them rather than showing the evaluator what they want to see and so people people often don't look at scoring criteria at all which is a real mistake because a big part of successful grant writing is ensuring that you're maximizing your points in as much as possible something as simple as just changing the wording to reflect what the funder has put out there what they want to see or adding an extra section on something that can make you know that just to address it a priority that you might not have noticed in your first kind of reading of the call these are the things that can kind of make or break an application and could be the difference between it being funded or not funded so we're going to have a look at scoring criteria today for horizons plus sport as our example so the scoring is divided into categories um the maximum score is 100 points and and the first uh kind of criteria or the first category is relevance of the project so there's a maximum of 30 points for this it's a like a weighted er a big category i suppose so um the first part of making sure that your project is relevant is that the project proposal is relevant to the objectives and the priorities of the action in addition the proposal will be considered as highly relevant if it addresses the priority of inclusion and diversity so um this is very important what people tend to do is kind of talk about that this project would be great for them and it would really add a lot of value to their organization and that it would be great for their service users and all of that stuff is very important and you do want to communicate that in your application but you also want to make it extremely clear that you know you're you're balancing it with the funders priorities at the end of the day it's their money and they have their own strategic objectives that they want to deliver on and you need to be able to very clearly demonstrate how your project helps to deliver on their objectives and this can be you know the objectives are listed very clearly in the program guide it's just a matter of copying and pasting out which of the objectives you know well at least that's what i do i take the actual objective that my project is going to release i put it into an answer and then explain and justify underneath how my project is going to feed into that priority and i might have one main priority that i'm going to hate it and maybe two secondary priorities and and and just justify and explain why this project is going to deliver on those priorities that's something very easy to do that you just you need to make it unignorable for them that they can clearly see what the link is between your priority between your project and their priority but the amount of people who don't do that is is is crazy when you consider that that's a very easy way to gain a few points and and then of course we mentioned this in the previous weeks when it came to designing your project you know the more you can include kind of inclusion diversity you know a purely sports project it's not that it can't be funded but if there is kind of a social element to it if it's reaching out to people who have fewer opportunities or if it's reaching out to more marginalized groups um you're obviously going to score extra points there because not only do you have a sports project it also has a social dimension to it as well so the more you can kind of weave that into your project the better and they also want to see the profile experience activities of the participating organizations are relevant to the field of applications so this is the information you would have gathered from your partners and their staff profiles their background their experience all of that kind of stuff but also your own staff profiles and backgrounds and experience and when we talked about this in designing your project a couple of weeks ago and it's about making sure that each consortium member has a specific skill or or area of expertise that they're going to contribute to the application and or to the project i should say and that they have a specific role to play and that they're the best qualified person to deliver on that role and they also like to see i suppose that they're it's not essential but it can be extra points if there's nice diversity in your in your um consortium so for example maybe you're um cooperating with a third level institute of sport or you're um if it's an organization or if it's a project that same just older people maybe you're collaborating with a um a civil society organization that's dedicated to older people so you get this kind of cross-sectoral input and expertise so um that's just something to consider and and that the proposal brings added value at eu level by building the capacity of organizations to engage in cross-border cooperation and networking so i think we've kind of gone on and on about this and every at every uh session how important it is that this is an eu project that it's said there's a very clear justification as to why this needs to happen at eu level like why do you need to cooperate with eu partners if it's if you just have an idea that something that you want to do nationally and you decide that eu funding is going to be your way to do it and so you attack on a couple of partners in a very istic way um that's going to be immediately apparent to an evaluator so it there everybody needs to have a meaningful role and you need to clearly explain why this project should be an eu project what's the added value of doing it at an eu level how does it incorporate um you know how does this partnership allow you to bring in views and expertise and ideas that you wouldn't necessarily have access to nationally but through your cooperation with your partners and how is the experience of delivering this project going to add to your own capacity and your partner's capacity to continue to engage in eu projects things like that so you want to make that clearly relevant and all of these things you know this can be a couple of sentences um each that you know you just include in your application that will just make it very easy for um an evaluator to kind of go tick tick tick and give you as many points as possible um the next thing then is quality of the project design and implementation so there's also party points um so they want to see clear realistic defined relevant objectives so again we talked about that a lot in the last couple of weeks in terms of you know having very kind of clear ideas keeping it simple keeping it straight forward making sure it's logical and and then attaching uh kpis real targets too so don't just say we're going to do an event like when are you going to do the event and how many people are you want to reach and what's the impact going to be so you know it's it's about giving something to measure against we talked a lot about impact and evaluation particularly at our first session there a couple of weeks ago and emily did a an additional session on impact and sustainability so definitely look back at that and with everything in your project look at how you can make it measurable or clear or defined um accessible inclusive and open to people with fear opportunities so again that's another opportunity if you if you can weave in that social element and and not just say that you're going to involve these people but also kind of say how you're going to make it obsessive to them and show that you've thought about that and you've thought about the kind of extra measures that you might need to do to make it inclusive and you've got more points available in a separate categories of that so there's an extra incentive there to do that a proposed methodology is clear adequate and feasible so this is this is again in that first session when we talked about the missing middle you know it's one thing to have an idea what you know having ideas are kind of 10 a penny but it's the how are you going to deliver on the idea that's what you need to convince them of so you know that's what you need to focus on is that methodology how you're going to deliver on this and it needs to be clear adequate and feasible so sometimes when people see things like that it can be a bit worrying and they're like oh i don't know how to communicate that if it's a very simple project if we're talking about a small project a small sport cooperation project your methodology might be like a half a page long you know it can be very simple and straightforward it just it doesn't have to be complicated obviously if you're going then your project is getting bigger and bigger and the budget is getting bigger and bigger then of course your methodology is going to need to be even more thorough and even more detailed but if it's if it's a small project it doesn't have to be very complicated it just has to be clearly outlined and incorporate the use of digital tools and learning methods to complement their physical activities so again this is something that people might not have you know the amount of people as i said who don't read the scoring um the scoring kind of criteria and don't realize but just by adding a bit of a digital element maybe like a digital learning module or something like that or a digital event bringing together coaches from around europe and for networking or something like that like something like that can be added to your project that would help to um maximize your criteria that they they might not you might not have even considered before when you're originally designing your project now i would warn against kind of shoehorning digital uh digitalization into a project that's not about digital so you know you don't have to do this but it's just something like really consider is there an opportunity to add kind of a digital element to a project that would add value and and make sure that you're mentioning ways like even digital tools that you're going to use to communicate or to design your project together and to deliver it you know it's just something to to think about is there any way that i can kind of capture those points and add any digital element that might add value to my project and you might not have thought of that had you not read the scoring criteria if you're already focused on your idea you might not have thought about how to add in these additional things like social inclusion and digitalization um the design designed in an eco-friendly way and incorporates green practices so this is extremely important all european programs are now really heavily focusing on this and i think what we see is that other funders are going to kind of follow suit as well and organizations are going to be expected to have kind of maybe a grain policy or something like that about how they're going to make their their projects as eco-friendly as possible and so this is something i think it's worth investing into doing for as an organization anyway if you haven't already so we might have um because i think more and more funders are going to be calling for it not just the eu and so this again it can be something as simple as a one-pager for your organization that you can refer to in your application or just a set of principles a short set of principles for example um you know trying to have this as um you know a paper-free project so that there's no printing or anything like that or that you have policies around using public transport whenever possible and for mainland europe using rail instead of air travel all of this kind of thing having considered that and showing that you've considered how to make your project as eco-friendly as possible is um you know is important and you will get points for that so make sure that you mention it and you can see that if you hadn't read these criteria it'd be very easy to omit that because you might not necessarily think of it but it is very important that you make sure that you mention that and then quality of the partnership and cooperation arrangements so involves an appropriate mix of participating organizations some kind of already covered that that everybody has a role it's very clear they're adding value and there's a nice you know potentially mixture of sectors and expertise and things like that um involves newcomers and less experienced organizations so look i've had projects funded that didn't um not in sport obviously in other parts of moralism um that didn't involve newcomers so it's not an absolute essential however um it certainly adds value and you can get a few extra points by adding a new plumber so why not i mean that's that's their way of kind of incentivizing um more experienced organizations kind of bring on uh newer organizations and mentor them if everybody here hasn't written an application before i mean you can kind of consider yourselves newcomers to to being coordinators so that could be the newcomer kind of element in your organization or your consortium but um yeah that's not an absolute essential but it certainly adds a couple of extra points and proposed allocation of tasks demonstrates the commitment and active contribution of all partners again it's the same stuff as we've been going on about everybody has to have a clear role you have to it has to be a true partnership where everybody is you know it's obvious that you trust your partners and that you're giving them specific tasks to do i often see in applications you know the irish partner will do this and that and this and it's just it's so obvious that people don't really trust or know their partners that well or don't feel comfortable delegating tasks to them so you know that's that's crystal clear to an evaluator so make sure that you avoid that and the proposal includes effective mechanisms for coordination and communication between participating organizations so that's just your kind of project management approach that you've thought about the practicalities like how are you going to communicate what's the project language going to be are you going to use email you're going to use some kind of software like trello or something like that and how often are you going to meet what's the reporting going to be like all these kind of structures what's the decision-making kind of structure of the organization who's going to make decisions you're going to make it together as a consortium all of these things again if it's a simple project this could be like you know a one-pager of your kind of project management approach i think we covered this a couple of weeks ago as well um but if it's a much more complicated project and you're in the hundreds of thousands or even millions then yeah you're gonna need something more comprehensive but it's just it's just to demonstrate that you've thought of all of these things that's what they're really looking for particularly those lower level projects and then impact and so this is again we we did a we've kind of been going banging on about impact these last couple of weeks so um it's always about impact it kind of comes back to impact at the end of the day um and we did a session on that at our at our first training there um a couple weeks ago so make sure you watch that back but includes concrete and logical steps to integrate project results into the regular work of participating organizations so yeah we kind of covered this um a couple of weeks ago where um you know there there's um there's the what the eu wants to do is they want to give the init the injection of cash that's needed to develop an innovation but once that cash kind of stops once the project has ended they want to see that that that it's not just going to die in its feet it's going to live on it can be seamlessly incorporated into your core work and it's going to continue to add value potentially for years to come so that's what we call sustainability and they want to see that whatever they're investing in is going to be sustainable then there's the whole thing that was called um used to be called excitation exploitation i think it's generally referred to as continuation where it's basically you don't just sustain it you also add to it further build it so you kind of want to mention that as well but you definitely want to at the very least demonstrate that the results will be sustainable uh potential for positive impact for people in communities you just need to make that very clear in your application that should be easy to do in the whole area of sport um includes an appropriate way to evaluate the project outcomes again it comes back to that kpis setting targets considering how you're going to monitor things how you're going to evaluate those things and then clearly demonstrating it concrete and effective steps to make the results of the european of the project known sorry and to publicly acknowledge european union funding so again this is your dissemination plan so this is where when i said earlier on you want to be calculating the reach of your partners asking them how many people engage in their services how many people follow them on socials how many people are in their newsletters and things like that and kind of calculate it together so you can have a very real concrete number in terms of your network of the combined partnership but then also have a strategy for how you're going to disseminate it so are you going to have websites where you have social media pages are you going to do posters or leaflets are you going to have events are you going to attend third party events just have a kind of clear strategy for how you're going to communicate the project and then you want to be very clear that you are going to publicly acknowledge european union funding in all public communications so that's basically the the scoring matrix what i'm going to do now is we're going to hear from an evaluator so um this is emma jane clark of previously of sport ireland i think up until very recently um but is now i think going out on her own and setting up a um a new um a new company or or spending more time on her company so um corey mcdonnell of sport ireland who i think has joined us now had a word with her earlier in the week and had a short interview and we made this little video that i'm going to try and play for you now i hope that it will work and maybe i can see christine on my screen so maybe you'll tell me if it works because i actually don't know if it will um in terms of the sound but i'll go ahead and press play and we can definitely see it so can you hear it no we don't hear it okay give me a second um we'll i'll just go ahead and um i i think it's if you you have to share share sound it should be when you have the thing on the full screen if you go to the top it should be share sound yeah i know i just uh forgot to do that before i share it so um one second and it's because i'm in the advanced chair so i don't know um now it should how are you doing this morning uh can i ask you to firstly if you would just introduce yourself and let us know what you have what your involvement have has been in eu funding applications good morning cormac my name is emma jane clark and i was a director of partnerships and governance in sport ireland and also around martinstown lodge i've been involved in the evaluation of erasmus plus projects and ranging from the small scale partnership projects to also the cooperation partnerships which are the larger fund great stuff okay okay great stuff so emma jane um could we cut straight to it and get some advice from you um could you basically tell us what from an evaluator's point of view are the most important things applicants need to keep in mind when preparing and submitting an eu funding application well the main priority is to understand what it is actually is applicable under the erasmus plus fund so if we talk about the cooperation partnerships are you clear on what the priority actions are the horizontal actions etc so fundamentally ensure that you're meeting the aims and objectives of the project and more so that your project fits under this rather than making your project fit under the fund the fund is basically split the evaluation is split into separate teams so it ranges from the relevancy the quality of the project design the quality of the project team the partners involved and the impact and the dissemination so a couple of tips would be is that ensure that you actually are aware of what the criteria are and that you include those and reference them in your application an example a quite a frequent example i would find is an evaluator that people wouldn't include anything about environmental um or eco-friendly approaches which is something that's wrong that is referenced under the um scp the cooperation partnerships also newcomers are there new partners coming that perhaps have less experience or no experience in eu funding again that's something that's will mark you down if you haven't selected a partner or if your project doesn't have that environmental um focus another thing is that there is a maximum number of pages and that's not an aim or a target that is the maximum number it's about quality versus quantity and ensuring that you get your point across in the most succinct way um that there's a really good needs analysis not the need for the sport the need for the project or you know very much what is the need and why why or what is it that um erasmus plus should consider this above anyone else to give funding for um so that's yeah so just you know that there's some really good there's a lot of a lot in there mha nam so just to kind of recap you first of all talked about being a role referencing the criteria and being very closely aligned to criteria the policy priorities the horizontal and vertical kind of objectives you talked about basically then the scoring system of the relevancy at the relevance of the project uh the quality of the partnership the uh the third one was the quality of the project itself quality of the project itself and the fourth one was dissemination or indeed you know yeah so you're saying your scoring would be generally across those four areas like you would score the project around those four areas and is there any particular weighting around those four then in terms of uh you know it would be strongly weighted are they just 25 no they have different weightings and i would just recommend people look on the erasmus plus guidelines and make sure that they're aware of what the criteria are and what the metrics are there um so but what i would say is um flow but there's a cohesive flow in the application that when i'm reading it it basically makes logical sense that there is a very clear methodology to the project from you know concept to you know inception to delivery that as someone looking at it from the outside can go okay this makes sense and i can see how all the objectives align with the overall aim of the project it's very common sensical but it's not necessarily that common sometimes in applications that people just throw everything out so just trust the process keep to what the question we know what the criteria are and answer answer your questions based on that in the application form okay so i think that's all very practical and so from a kind of a uh i suppose from certainly from just maybe slightly from an evaluator's point of view what are the pet hates what are the things that you really dislike as an evaluator and you when you see in an application you go oh god uh you mentioned one there which was the length uh you know that you keep within the actual prescribed number of pages don't go so you know this idea for example of waffling on and doing too much is that something that kind of bugs you it does if it's words for the sake of words and if they're not relevant again you have you know i think it's 70 pages i can't remember exactly that you can you can go to and it's about the relevancy of the information and don't make the font really small to try and keep it within the 70 pages because again bearing in mind with multiple projects to evaluate up to 400 000 it's just you know making it as easy to follow as possible um another pet agent's not not reaching the criteria matched in the application form so you know no reference as i said to environmental friendly approaches no reference to newcomers people want to help you get across the line so you have to look at what you can do to make it as easy as possible for the information to be evaluated um and that that's really it i mean the quality of the projects are great um in the main um and also one final thing is as i said initially don't try and get your project to fit the fund measure but you know don't because that will come across that you're trying to to um i suppose tailor the project into the fund and that you you can tell when you're reading it that you're just looking for funding and not necessarily actually have a project that actually this fund would fit if that makes sense okay yeah that's great look at emma chain uh that's fantastic uh best of luck with the new business and thanks for giving us some of those insights uh you might be seeing a couple of irish applications cross your table at some stage so uh you know beat them kindly hopefully you'll need more from ireland it'll be great thanks a million okay so there you go that kind of uh we can hear directly from an evaluator there um i'm just going to one second now i just have to share my screen again um i do want to just um touch on something that uh emma jane mentioned that there she said um she made some really interesting points i think about this isn't rocket science it's about very clear logical uh realistic sticking to the point and meeting all the criteria so it's very much very it's easily laid out there if you follow all of those scoring criteria you will do well in in the points so it's not um there's not some kind of dark arch to it it is very straightforward and one thing that she mentioned there at the end i think that i wanted to touch on was just this idea of fitting your project around the priorities and kind of finding that balance um and there's a venn diagram i usually use in my general grant writing training about that so um i think what what sometimes happens is that uh the the writer the project writer makes it all about their priorities and what they really want is to fund this project and so they find a way to kind of shoehorn their project into the priorities of the of the funder so it's a very convoluted or very kind of uh you know tenuous connection between what you want to do and the and the what the funder wants to do what their priorities are and then there's a lot of you spend a lot of the application kind of justifying why this project should fit under their priorities and if you do that you know they'll immediately see through that and it's not you're going to have put a lot of effort into a into an application that isn't going to be funded because it fundamentally does not sync up with the funders priorities um and then there's what emma jane was mentioning there and i think this is very common and it happens a lot in eu projects is where somebody looks at the at the priorities that the funder has and basically creates a project specifically to deliver on them and maybe it's nothing to do with their core goals or their for work and it's a very obvious kind of pandering to the funders priorities and a very clear funding grab that somebody has created a project solely to get funded and not really to deliver any kind of meaningful impact in their organizations or add to their core work or anything like that so what you're always looking for is that kind of sweet spot in the middle where there's a very clear overlap between your priorities and the funder priorities and that would be abundantly clear and of course you're going to spend a couple of sentences explaining that but you know it shouldn't be a stretch for them for the evaluator to see that there is a clear overlap if you're having to shoehorn a project in to a particular fund then maybe that's not the right funding opportunity for it so that's something that you need to consider and there will be other opportunities for that and you can come to access europe and maybe we'll help you maybe one thing is the answer maybe it's not but um you know if you're having to really you know shove your project into their priorities it's probably not going to work and similarly if you're if you're writing a project for the sake of getting funding and it's clearly not going to deliver on any of your priorities it might seem like oh well you know we just really need the funding but ultimately that's even if it did get funded which it probably wouldn't because it's very clear when that happens um it becomes kind of a distraction from your core work from your everyday work and it actually doesn't add any value so i'm gonna very quickly go over we are gonna uh we're switching around our schedule a little bit so we're gonna go to a case study very soon in about five or ten minutes um and then we're gonna have 10 minutes for the case study and we're going to take a short break but before we do that i do want to just have a quick look at everything that we've talked about this morning as we're on this thread i'll just continue um what does that actually look like so we've talked about the scoring matrix and what they're looking for we've um we've looked at we've heard from emma jane from an evaluator's perspective what she would be looking for when she's evaluating projects and then we've looked at how to kind of balance your priorities and thunders priorities and know whether this is the right kind of opportunity so how is this actually reflected in the application form and the questions so i'm going to go through that as quickly as i can here so we won't go into much detail but um just look at the different sections of the application and where you have a chance and they clearly give you a chance to hit every single one of those um priorities or those scoring criteria so the first one then is in the background and the general objective so this is this is very much your opportunity to tell the story of your project and to kind of demonstrate to your evaluator that you're this isn't just something that you've created as a funding grab or this isn't something that you know doesn't fit in with with the objectives of erasmus plus sports so what emma emma jane was talking about there and this is your opportunity to demonstrate that this is this project arose from an organic from a real need from an identified gap and to explain how it evolved and how you know maybe you as the irish partner came up with the idea but then you brought together your partners and you fleshed it out together and now you have this project and this is what you want to achieve and you're going to outline your objectives it's very it's very important to outline specific objectives in bullet point format because you will find yourself referring to them again and again throughout the application later on when you're talking about work packages you'll be linking well what does this work package have to do with the objectives if you have that bullet point list it can be really handy so this is your opportunity to do that to demonstrate that this project is meeting a real need and it evolved organically in response to a need and then you've got your needs analysis energy and mention that as well and your specific objectives so a couple of weeks ago we talked about the kind of problem solution impact approach and so this is a really good opportunity that the problem is the need is whatever it is you're addressing and as we said last week you're going to use your sources you're going to clearly justify that then you're going to propose your solution and then you're going to talk about your impact which is the specific objectives the measurable change that you're going to achieve and complementarity with other actions and innovation european added value so again this is all about why does this project need to happen at eu level how is it going to how how do the different european partners add value and you know how do they all complement the kind of the action how did how does it complement their existing actions and innovation how does it link up with other projects that they might be doing and how does um you know what's the what's the value of doing this at eu level so that's your opportunity to address that criteria then in quality they talk about project design and implementation so this is your concept which is your idea and your methodology about how how you're going to deliver on that your project management quality assurance monitoring and evaluation strategy so again this is your opportunity to talk about how you're going to communicate with your projects how you're going to structure and manage the project how um how you're going to ensure you know what does quality look like in this project what are your what are your aims in terms of like what are you looking for an 80 increase in um satisfaction with the particular sports program or whatever it is you're going to put a kpi there and then you're going to talk about how you're going to monitor and how you're going to evaluate and measure that and you're going to talk about your project team staff and experts so this is where you can use those staff profiles and demonstrate how each of the partners is adding something and how you're all going to work together as a team there is a section on risk management this isn't necessary for the lower level grants you don't have to fill in that section but if you are going for a higher grant you just need to you know you need to identify the risks and then the mitigation strategies and partnership and cooperation arrangements this is how your consortium came to be how it's set up what's the structure of it and then the management and decision making so how are you going to work together to make decisions so usually it is just a case of you know that there's a structure that there's you know a project manager or project coordinator in each organization and together they become like the steering committee that make decisions and then there's all the people who work on the project underneath them who feed into the process so you just need to explain what that is it doesn't have to be very complicated the simpler the better but it does have to be explained and impact so again we keep coming back to impact and see that word a million times so again go back and watch emily's session there where we talk about impact in the first one in in the first training of this series we did a couple of weeks ago and outlined what is your impact what is your ambition what is your your results that you want to achieve and you have the opportunity then to talk about your communication dissemination and visibility so that's all that stuff that i mentioned earlier in terms of your combined reach your combined network as a partnership and how you're going to disseminate around that but then also things like are you gonna have a website or you can have your social media pages are you gonna have x y and z so you have to have like a little communication strategy worked out and again it's a small project it doesn't have to be very complicated the bigger your project the more complicated it does have to be and the more thorough it has to be um but you just have to have have a clear plan for how you're going to communicate your project and of course mentioning that eu funding visibility um and then sustainability and continuation i've already explained that the sustainability is how you're going to absorb and keep the results alive beyond the funding and continue them but then also you maybe mention how you might further build on them maybe this is just the first step but you're going to apply for another project or maybe you're going to look at ways of kind of exploiting it nationally and finding further funding and development so you have opportunities in in the application form to hit every single one of those criteria that are outlined and so you just have to make sure that you're taking all of those boxes because as emma jane said there they want to give you the points they really do they just need you to help them and kind of meet them halfway and and give them what they're looking for so that they can take that box and give you full points after that then it's about uh translating the work plan work packages timing and subcontracting there's usually nothing new here you will have already explained your project and all of everything that you're going to do and all of the impacts and all the results and how you're going to do it and now they just want to kind of you to translate it into a work plan where you actually kind of divide it out into work packages and activities and designate roles and there's kind of all these tables that they want you to to fill it into uh in order for uh you know for it to kind of make sense of the work plan so there's not just this narrative document there's also kind of a more um you know workflow type of a document that illustrates it so there shouldn't be anything usually new in here you should always be referring back to the different things that you've already explained in your project in your in your application and so i suppose that's really is you can see there clearly how um how you uh explain how what the what the scoring matrix is how it impacts how you're evaluated and where you have an opportunity in the application to kind of hover up all those points and there's a very clear plan and in the application it's even more helpful because they give you specific prompts and we're going to look at that later and they give you loads of information under each every question that tells you exactly what it is they want to hear so as long as you do that you're in with a good chance of maximizing your points but before we look at that we're going to have a quick case study now uh in a moment and then we're going to give you a short break and we'll come back then and look more closely at a question but for now i'm going to hand over to dr noel doyle of leave no trace ireland and he's going to talk to us a little bit about his experience of putting together a successful project so noel over to you when you're ready yep uh thanks very much uh thanks emma and let's open up the powerpoint so good morning everyone my name is noah doyle i am the coordinator for the sustainability and environmental education in outdoor sports and recreation project also known as the sea project it is a large collaboration with over 10 international partners from across europe and i represent leave not trace ireland we're a small environmental charity in ireland that promotes responsible recreation throughout the outdoors across ireland so i'm going to just talk for a couple of minutes very briefly on what the c project is and what it aims to do so the c project aims to raise awareness across eu member states on outdoor sports and the importance of communication and sustainability in environmental education we want to review the level of environmental education that's incorporated into coaching and leadership programs and we also want to develop and share methodologies and examples of good practice that have been used in other countries across europe and develop a toolkit of of good practice that can then be incorporated into future environmental sorry outdoor sports educational programs so aside from this our next goal is to disseminate this information that is applicable across eu member states and then hopefully in the future applicable across across the globe so i'm just going to give a little bit about the background of the um of the sea project yet the project was first conceptualized from a collaboration with the european network of outdoor sports uh two members of the board mike mcclure and uh barbara i identity had developed this concept for a project and they got in contact with lead not trace uh with a mind to collaborate because legal traits itself were quite a small non-profit and to date we hadn't actually done any um large uh erasmus projects as a lead we had done we have taken part in a two erasmus projects before the imprint project in ng europe and so this is the first time that this kind of opportunity was presented to us and even though it was out it was put into the context of outdoor sports and leave no traces outdoor recreation it was our ethos on environmental sustainability and the communication of good practices that kind of drew us to the project so the next thing i'll say is that after the expression of interest we met in person with uh with mike and barbara until late 2019 early 2020 to discuss the different elements of the application this is much like what emma was saying throughout it you kind of really need to identify what are the key components of what this project is and how it can take shape uh from there we worked with uh identifying potential partners from across europe using the erasmus portal and using the enos network to try and identify and match the skills and expertise to what we envisioned this project to be so for us it was a collaboration between the development of outdoor sports and environmental sustainability in protected areas across europe so we picked outdoor sports just because it's a freely accessible in many cases freely to participate outdoor sports has a long history of successful use for personal social development outdoor sports and the use of the outdoors also can enshrine a sense of awareness or ownership to make people more aware and protect the environment because outdoor sports take place in these beautiful massive landscapes and it kind of enshrines this kind of belief that they need to protect the outdoors so um it was through this that we started picking our partners who were involved in outdoor sports but also partners who were involved in the protection of the outdoors so we have the imba so the irishman the international mountain biking association we also had rock climbers as snowboarders uh organizations from serbia just to try and get this blend of the different outdoor sports that can be involved in this project the project delivery as i said before it was a large collaboration as emma said you kind of have to break down your project into a number of work packages we have five work packages from work package zero to four where package zero is the coordination and the administration of the project in which leno trace are the lead organization and me is the coordinator which involves the setting of meetings the organization of of the governance documents the uh collaboration and making sure that every other work package is working effectively uh the thing that has always worked for me uh as project lead has been open communication with all the partners so that involves setting up zoom meetings team meetings with the different identified work package leads having open communication with emails and phone calls i've instigated a policy that every month there is a monthly email going out to all partners just kind of keeping everyone up to date because at times when you have a large project over a number of years you will have work packages that haven't even started yet until late into the second year and sometimes you can feel like the people in work package three aren't involved so having constant updates and emails uh just keeps them on track of what's going on as well as that every six weeks we have a zoom meeting uh just to keep all partners collaborate and just keep that to face because in 2020 and 2021 it's been it's been tough to try and keep in contact with many people so work package one which was the identification of outdoor sports federations and the examination of the issues that they face in regards to outdoor sports uh work package two which is the exchange program where we're in the development of a toolkit of good practice we've just finished our first survey exchange where some of these pictures are are from the presentation we went to uh serbia down by nabashita which is the tara national park and it was all about developing and getting examples of good practice from our partners on how to teach and how to perform outdoor sports in a sustainable way so this got experts from across across europe to come with us and tell us what they know and hopefully we can develop at the end of the exchange program a toolkit of good practice we're getting ready for our portugal exchange was happening in november 2021 uh covet had a massive effect effect on how much we could do so the the dates have to be changed which is something that you're going to have to deal with as coordinators for your own projects there our meeting dates uh had to change and that's an issue of talking with the european commission and actually making sure that you're aware you know what you're doing and that changes can be made in time and it's just something that um you just have to deal with so the development um for us in a practical sense we found it very important to establish and confirm partners at the get-go so mike and barbara from enos got in contact with us and wanted us to be the project lead and then we met with them over a in person multiple times over multiple days because this cannot be kind of quickly done you need to establish what you want your project to be how it fits in with the goals as i was saying of the organization of the european commission to make sure that you're not just pandering to what they want you are linking what your goals and what your organizations want to create and make sure that it is suitable we wanted to broaden the concepts of the work packages so this sounds like something that is in your head but it's really putting it down to what each work package will be who is going to be the best partner identifying the best partner will have the range of skills and abilities and expertise in order to complete this work package and getting in touch with them but also in that as emma was saying i'm sure many of you are worried about the actual application itself we found it highly useful to divide the application into manageable sections for partners to complete and this did a number of things i think emmy had already mentioned that you know we don't want it to seem like it's one person doing everything so by dividing the application and handing each application and each piece that was relevant to each partner to fill out themself and we use shared drives and google drives that was already mentioned we were able to everyone was able to incorporate themselves and get involved in the project from the start and yeah for us a key learning was that all partners uh need to be fully involved and even if it just involved putting in the uh piece about who their organization is their cvs stuff like that it's just that constant open communication and collaboration because that builds the trust and it builds the relationships because that is essential to the erasmus project is effectively what the heart of the what an erasmus collaboration project is meant to be that all these different organizations and countries are working together in order to develop something what we also did is that we defined our timelines for the completion of this application because while we have multiple partners creating and writing separate pieces of the application at the end of the day we left it to one partner early not just ireland to consolidate all the different elements back into the final application and so in order to do that we had to develop the coordination of timelines for when we wanted each piece of the application completed and and that was done and then we consolidated it all into a final document that could be sent to everyone for final reviews evaluations and just to see if anything needed to be added or taken away in order that it matched what the european commission was looking for as well as it's still linked to what our personal goals were and that was very important to us so advice i would give um just from lessons learned uh you gotta identify the partners uh to your networks your own networks and you can also use the erasmus portal for people always looking for uh to take part in a project and to blend skills with experience now emma and i said that it helps if you have organizations that are new to erasmus it helps with the points and bringing them along and showing them how it's done and that is true but i would also argue that it's very important to have someone who has been through it as well as a partner on the team because they can show you the pitfalls they can calm you down when there's uh stress is coming so having that little bit of experience in your erasmus partners was essential always connect with your sport agencies as many agencies that can help in how you even answering simple questions because sometimes things can be quite difficult divide the workload so even though you are dividing the workload of the project into work packages divide the workload of the application in the work packages because it is a large and daunting document so working together and divides it makes it much easier for everyone to review evaluate and prove your submissions because even though many organizations are professional stuff when you're dealing with european countries the translation of uh of some of the um application pieces can be lost and there can be sometimes odd mistakes that just kind of affect the flow of the application so always be aware to review evaluate and prove those submissions communication and coordination this project would not have been able to take place had we not taken the time at the beginning to use two days multiple times to go up and talk to mike mcclure talk to sport north ireland and our enos partnerships and work out what this project is going to be timelines have efficient timelines and i'll even give this little bit of advice is that don't leave the submission of the application to the last minute the application procedure onto the erasmus website is not uh straightforward sometimes as you might think uh it's not as intuitive as you might think so if if i was being i would say you give at least a week when you have everything together to make sure that everything goes up onto the platform correct because there's you do not want to be struggling on the last day to upload the last page and making sure so give at least a week of time free to make sure that the application goes uh plus through the erasmus portal uh correctly and have a lead applicant consolidate into the final document with the assistance of everyone else so the project will have a project coordinator but also have a lead applicant to make sure that the application goes through smoothly some other advice that if every application goes through successfully and it's great i have some other advice um number one the course coordinator or the lead applicant just be aware that you will be the one that the european commission will discuss with you you are the coordinator you are in charge of the project and just from a financial point of view just being charged just be in contact with your financial department because the funding goes directly to you so and then you disseminate the funding to the partners so that's a very important thing just just to be aware of because it can be quite a substantial amount of funding that then you need so your financial department might be going a little crazy is where did all this money come from so you just need to have that set in place in order that you can then exchange it with the partners the main learning that we had was projects like this it was essential to have good governance and policies set in place with all of our partners and agreed before it could take place so we developed partnership agreements we developed a code of ethics governance policies that you might not have developed you might have developed for your organization but we also felt it was important to develop it specifically for the project just so everyone is aware of what is happening everyone is aware of a greed set of this is the code of conduct this is our governance code this is our risk management so how this is part of my job is making sure that every partner is aware of the organization and what needs to be done um aside from that i think i if i'll stop there if anyone has any questions uh feel free to to let me know or if i've gone too fast and you want me to go over anything at all uh happy to worry thank you very much no no that was great go ahead cormac sorry oh thanks emilia noel uh just uh just to acknowledge the fact that uh sport ireland is a uh uh obviously a partner believe not trace ireland but uh just it's it's a superb project and uh just to thank noel for um i suppose his work on the project but also giving us a a comprehensive overview of uh pretty much beginning and indeed in in project i know that noel was a in slovenia last week or uh maybe some other european country i think and he's off again in november so that's that's the positive side of the project of course uh you're able to go and have your visits uh into different countries seeing different areas uh working and meeting and having cultural exchanges with their bigger partners and also doing your work as well you know so i think that that's a that's kind of an important dimension to it you're getting you some very nice photographs in the background there and all of uh different locations that no doubt that you're uh doing mobile workshops in and and collaborating with you know so excellent work but really practical advice there really interested obviously hearing more about just that groundwork that you were doing around uh mou's and partnerships and governance piece to just that and i know that that for big projects that's the kind of uh i suppose you might call it that's the type of uh due diligence that you might be looking at you know you're looking for real partner buy-in obviously for smaller projects you know it can it may not be as intense i think you know um you know if partnerships are much tighter one or two partners or more you know and uh projects are much smaller well then the uh the amount of governance maybe uh can be scaled ingly would you would you concur with that yeah absolutely that we have we have ten international partners and like they all have they would all have their own code of governance and code of ethics and their own policies on data use and stuff so it was very for me we wanted just to make a single you know for this project this is the code of ethics for this project and it was work it wasn't us saying this is the law you now assign it this was built with them you know i'm not just saying here we we're the coordinator you must do this it was like hey guys we're drafting up this call of ethics policy this is our complaints policy you know if there is an issue and it even goes down to find for a financial management policy because it becomes you know we were like in when we were awarded the the funding uh you know all the set was it 70 of the funding was awarded to us straight away and you know that's right that's major warning lights for a financial organ for the financial department of the organizations like where did this come from so we needed to have all these things in place to say no everyone relax this is how it happens this is the money going out and we didn't want we wanted to make sure that the partners knew when exactly they were getting their portion of the of the funding which is the thing because we didn't want to give them all the money straight away we wanted to make sure it was proportioned and make sure that this was agreed on with our partners so uh for smaller organizations and smaller collaborations i'm sure there it can be tailed back a little bit but if you're going larger this project wouldn't have worked if we didn't have these clear guidelines of who's doing what who's doing when if there is a problem this is what happens if these are the risks that are associated with it risk the risk register was a major one uh for us because we had to develop and identify risks and some of the one of the risks which occurred was colbert covered was it was a risk that although it wasn't a major impact to the project it was something that we had worked on with the partners that if cove would made doing the starting the exchange program which was meant to begin in june what what occurs and that's and then as my job as the coordinator was talk to the european commission and say what can we do and the the option was to um just reschedule and that's what we did we instead of starting in june our exchange program began in september and the way we did that is we talked to each of the hosts of the work package of the exchange program and say when can you actually still do this exchange for exchange program but still showcase the sports and the activities that you want to showcase so we had to change around the order where so serbia was was okay but we had to change around the order so portugal is in november we're going and then sweden is in uh february france and march but we still were able to do this and then keep the final deadline of ireland in june 2022 uh intact so it's always open communication developing this trust uh from the get-go and even in the application phase even if you have a smaller partner who doesn't have too much to do with the application if you can put in get them to incorporate who their organization is their cvs and just put that in it gets people work talking and gets people communicating it and for me the monthly emails six every six weeks we we have zoom call just going through all the work we have our steering committing meetings uh so it's it's just that constant trust because and i know people are getting zoomed fatigued and nowadays but it's just kind of keeps that face to face uh and that's what's important for us thanks great stuff um um that's great stuff i mean there's a couple of a couple of questions coming in there on the chat boxes uh maybe christina and emma and emily might pick up on some of those uh there's kind of obviously a couple of requests there for different templates but i think there's just a lot of information that noel has touched on there i just have just a question you would have worked on a lot of this null once you receive notification that you were successful in the application so that really is the kickstarter for okay now we've actually got uh we've been funded now we can actually our you know did you do some of these governance and policies and uh code of ethics uh documents and agreements did you do that in advance uh in the lead up to the prepa when you were preparing the application yeah so the we had our official project kickoff meeting in february uh 2021 but in the we were given notification that the project was successful in you know late october november 2020 so you know as coordinators and for myself personally i wanted to get working with uh the different work package leaders and the different uh partners as soon as possible so we had two three meetings actually in the months of october to december just getting in touch with them and we would send drafts to different work package leaders just to get their um their reflections on you know governance policies with this code of ethics policy what do you think of this is there anything on your side that should be used uh the data data security policy was was one that was kind of uh uh suggested as well and the risk registers are not we kind of just had to sit down over zoom with the work package leaders and trying to go through the different risks and how we can assess these risks and at what level will these risks affect the worst case scenario you know part of the coordinator's job is to be the doom and gloom of erasmus projects that you have to keep looking at what can go wrong and how do we fix this so if something does happen it can be addressed quickly okay and cormac i'll have to put it there because we promised them a break 10 minutes ago so we're going to take a bit of no worries no thank you very much for all of that that was really really useful i think it's very handy to see that kind of first-hand insight and and i've addressed the questions that came up there in the chat around uh templates and things like that so definitely reach out to access europe and we'll help as much as we can but we're going to go ahead and take a break until um we'll stay until like 16 minutes past it'll have to be five minutes i'm afraid because otherwise we'll go over sorry about that and so we'll go ahead and pause there for five minutes i'll see you about 16 17 minutes past it okay thanks everybody okay i think we can all start to come back now or we might get started anyway people can filter back so that we can we can finish on time so um we're going to jump in now the next our next step is to quickly look at some general grant writing rules so we've kind of covered a lot of the details of erasmus plus and thankfully this next section is a little bit shorter so that's good we should be finished on time and we've covered a lot of the kind of heavy stuff so far so now we're going to look at some kind of general rules when it comes to grant writing just best practice and then we're going to have a look at a specific method that you can use when it comes to answering questions to kind of help break them down and make it simpler and we're going to take a look at a specific example from erasmus sport of a question and show how how we would answer that um so let's have a quick look at these general rules first and foremost so general grant writing rules when it comes to communicating your project i mean i think we've we've said this enough so i won't continue to labor the point but that european dimension is key at all times you want to be building in why is this a european project how does it relate to european policy how does it relate to the program all of that you want to make that unignorable throughout your your application again this is going to be very reiterated of everything that we've covered so far just so that you know because the principles are the same regardless of whether it's an eu branch or otherwise but it's not about you you have to continuously bring it back to the funders priorities how are you going to be delivering on the funders priorities specifically quote the priorities in the application that your project will help to address and make it abundantly clear that your project is closely aligned to their uh their priorities sometimes people have a tendency to kind of go on and on about how this project is going to be great for them but they don't demonstrate how it's going to help the funder to deliver on their priorities so make sure that that's very clear again we've heard this over and over again some of you might have heard of the kiss principle um it's keep it simple stupid or keep it stupid simple and make it as clear and as straightforward as possible there is a thing that people do sometimes it's usually in project management but it can be in project design as well it's called gold plating it's where they get an idea and it's a great idea and then they kind of get over excited and they're like oh and then we could do this maybe we could add this and then we'll add this other thing and before you know it you have this kind of frankenstein's monster of an idea that's just really complicated like you know the person might get the original idea but the more you add to it the more complicated it becomes and the more difficult it is to follow from an evaluator's perspective and also um the more on unrealistic it seems because you're not going to be able to do all of this within the time frame and so always keep it simple see the project as the first step in an overall european development plan and make it very realistic and be specific so we've talked about that a lot over the last couple of weeks you need to set you need to be specific about your target groups specific about your kpis don't leave anything too general make sure that the um the evaluator has something to kind of sink their teeth into that it's not all very vague and woolly and talking about things that are going to happen but not giving any rea