The grant you should not take
Some funding costs more than it pays. I have learned to read the price before the amount.
I spent most of last week deciding not to bid for something.
The call fitted on paper. The budget was serious, the consortium was willing, and we had a real chance at it. I write proposals for a living, so I know what a winnable call looks like. That one was winnable.
We did not submit. The reasoning took me the better part of fifteen years to arrive at, and I still find it uncomfortable.
In this sector, winning is the whole story. You announce the grant, people congratulate you, and nobody asks what the money will have you doing for the next three years. The arrival of the money is treated as the end of the question rather than the start of it.
I have come to read a call the other way round. Before I look at the amount, I look at the price.
The price is almost never the co-financing. It is what the work turns you into.
Every grant arrives with a shape. Work packages, deliverables, a reporting rhythm, partners you did not choose. Take it and you have agreed to spend three years becoming the organisation that produces those deliverables. If that is the organisation you were building anyway, the money is a gift. If it is not, you have been paid to go somewhere else, and you will arrive.
Some grants build capability you can sell afterwards. Others build capability that dies with the final report.
The second kind is more common than the sector admits. The project closes, the platform is parked, the method was shaped around one funder's priorities and fits nothing else, and the people who learned it move on because there is nothing to move them onto. You were busy for three years. You were solvent for three years. You accumulated nothing.
The cost I underestimated for the longest time was my own attention. A serious proposal is six weeks of the most expensive thinking in the company. Delivery is years of it. A grant that fits badly does not only cost you the co-financing, it costs you whatever you would have built with those years instead, and that figure appears in no budget.
The grants worth taking look different, obviously so once you are looking for it. They pay you to get better at something you were going to get better at anyway. The deliverable is a thing you would have built regardless, now funded and with a deadline attached. The partners are people you want in the room in five years, when none of this is funded. I have had three of those. In two of the three, the budget was the smaller part of what we got.
I have got this wrong in both directions. I have taken work because the number was good and spent two years mildly resenting it. I have also walked away from a call that a better-organised version of SENIC would have absorbed without strain, and watched someone else deliver it well. Reading the price is a judgement, not a formula, and I do not always read it correctly.
What I do now is write the answer down early, before the deadline pressure starts and while I can still think. Two or three sentences on what we will be able to do at the end of this that we cannot do now, and who would pay for it. If I cannot write those sentences without hedging, the hedging is the answer.
The call I passed on last week would have paid well and taught us nothing we could carry. Three years of competent delivery, a clean final report, and a team no stronger at the end than at the start.
Grant-dependency does not begin when the funding stops. It begins the first time you take money for work you would not otherwise have chosen, and discover that you can.
— Profit, on purpose.