3 benefits to involving a consultant to help with your grant application

Grants are an effective way to raise non-dilutive funding for your organization. Applying for and winning grants, however, is difficult, nuanced, and time-consuming. Your application must stand out against a fierce competition. In order to help with the onerous task of getting the desired funding, you might want to involve a consultant to help take your application to the next level. The following three advantages illustrate how a consultant can help.

The following three advantages illustrate how a consultant can help.

1. Funding industry Knowledge

Consultants are knowledgeable about the different funding programs and best practices. This gives them insight into which grant aligns best with your goals/company and which strategy is recommended. Due to their elaborate experience, they are on top of the requirements, eligibility rules, formats, and budgets of specific calls. This enables the opportunity to create an application with well-developed project budgets, meaningful and measurable outcomes, and full alignment with the scope of the grant. All of this serves to increase your chances of success, while saving you an incredible amount of time and allowing you to focus on your day-to-day operations.

2. Idea development

Consultants can deploy their objectivity towards important creative solutions. Their out-of-box thinking can optimize your business model and development plan and even refocus the targeted customers and market. By focusing on the bigger picture, they can bring a fresh, unbiased approach to solving problems based on the information you have provided and not what you would like to hear. Consultants have worked with many different companies and may have worked through similar problems in the past, which means they can provide an insider perspective based on what they have seen to work (or not) before.

3. Consortium building

At this moment, most of the grants are consortium-based. These applications require you to collaborate in consortia with partners from different backgrounds and countries. Developing a competitive consortium and making sure that each partner brings something to the table, is a time-consuming task involving many meetings and conversations. This is exactly where a consultant can be of great assistance. They can leverage their network, perform extensive partner searches, and take introductory calls to assess their fit with your company and the grant’s concept. Because of these selection rounds, they bring you into contact with interested and high-potential new partnerships for the grant application, and even long-lasting collaborations beyond that. Also, a consultant will make sure that the consortium is eligible in line with the call requirements.

Involving a consultant is therefore an investment in the success of the application and aids to avoid common delays, like scope creep, partner search and unclear guidelines. This can make the difference between getting the grant application done right and getting awarded. Would you like to know more? Contact us.

This article was written by Peter Ruizendaal, Life Sciences Consultant at Catalyze.