Increasing Your Chances of a Successful Application

Blog Post by Sarah Axon, Grants Manager for Ufi VocTech Trust

Ufi's VocTech Seed call is now open - and many people will be working hard to meet the closing date of 5pm on 11th February 2021.

We know there is fierce competition for any grant funding. So what can you do to improve your chances of success?

We have published lots of guidance and information about our aims and what we are looking for. Read it carefully. It will answer many of your questions.

The guidance and general FAQs are on our website. You can also look at our strategy and delivery plan which set out our organisational objectives and how we are working to meet them.

If you are still struggling to find an answer you can email us at info@ufi.co.uk.

Ufi’s Stage 1 application form is deliberately quite short, so think of your application as a hypothesis.

Give us a succinct explanation of the vocational learning issue you are intending to address and explain your idea for using technology to solve this. How will you test the idea and how will you know if is successful?

You know your learners better than we do. We are interested in hearing about the real issues that they face and the tangible learning improvements that your project aims to provide.

Why don’t existing solutions work for them? What’s missing that your project will supply? Describe how you expect the project to produce tangible benefits to learners and employers and explain what those expected benefits are.

Tell us which organisations have agreed to take part in the development and testing of the idea.

Be clear about how many learners will be involved in user testing. Where are your testers coming from? How will they be involved? NB ‘build it and they will come’ might have worked for Kevin Costner but for this project you’ll need more concrete plans.

You’ve got an idea for a project – but where’s the evidence that this is an issue to be solved? What information are you basing this on? What supports your idea that there is a demand from users for the product or approach that is proposed?

Tell us about any feedback from learners, providers or employers that might have been involved in testing or developing the proposal. In other words, explain what your hypothesis is based on.

Use the word limits carefully to provide a clear and coherent description of the project. Many applicants tell us lots about themselves, their team and past track record - which is all important - but they don’t go on tell us enough about their proposed project.

We need to be able to see the purpose of the project, and how it meets the criteria for the funding call and matches Ufi’s mission.

We really want to hear a clear and compelling case for the project. If you’ve got a good idea – then tell us about it.

Stage 1 is your opportunity to tell us who the learners are, how the new approach will provide effective learning and how learners will ultimately benefit. Use simple language to tell us what you intend and why - we don’t need acronym soup. If you are invited to Stage 2 there will be plenty of opportunity to provide more detail on how you intend to deliver.