By Sean McDougall

It’s no secret that the companies that win multiple grants score highly to start with, start on time, make great progress and finish in style. Less known is the fact that many of them work with grant managers to maximise their chances of success at every stage of the process. In this short article, I want to explain the role of the grant manager, as someone who has guided almost £10m in funded projects from start to finish line – and beyond.

Grant managers are highly experienced veterans of government-funded competitions, often with additional experience as bid-writers, Monitoring Service Providers and assessors (I am all of the above). They use that experience to anticipate and mitigate looming risks at every stage of the project and to help clients make the very most of opportunities, paving the way for further grants, commercial success and follow-on investment.

They work at every stage from Grant Offer Letter to post-project commercialisation. Let’s have a look at the different stages:

Pre-start

IUK has a checklist of tasks that must be completed before any project will be allowed to start. Grant managers make the process run much quicker and more smoothly, enabling projects to start on time and addressing critical issues that could cause your grant offer to be withdrawn.

Collaboration agreements

Grant managers typically have vast experience of collaboration agreements that complements the work of lawyers and speeds up the production process. Drawing on experience of real-world implementation, they can highlight clauses that could have unintended consequences and explain them in plain English. This then makes it much easier for lawyers to finalise a document that works for everyone. I had one client that was working with a university: the very long turnaround times between drafts brought them perilously close to missing their mandatory start date. I facilitated a meeting between both sets of lawyers and the relevant staff in both organisations and everything was resolved in one meeting

Budgets

One of my clients nearly lost a £1m grant because they had included 10 people under the Labour budget who were in fact on long term secondment from another company. Knowing how IUK works, I was able to draft a letter that led IUK to treat them as employees and the whole £1m was saved.

Live phase

Once projects are live, grant managers are with you every step of the way, providing strategic guidance and insight that saves time, increases impact and ensures that the value of the grant is maximised.

There is also a requirement to report to the Monitoring Service Provider once a quarter. Claims must be filed and evidenced; core documents must be updated; and a new summary presentation must be prepared. At intervals, an independent accountant’s report must be commissioned. Any issues relating to these will cause your quarterly grant payment to be delayed. Projects that work with grant managers reduce their admin burden and tend to get paid faster, score higher and have easier meetings than might otherwise be the case.

These projects also gain access to expert advice, with grant managers helping to deliver clarity where previously there was worry and fog.

Post project

In order to receive final payment, there are a series of post-project completion tasks that must be fulfilled, including a report, an independent accountant’s report, and a finalised exploitation plan that sets out your route to market and growth plans over the next five years.

Many founders struggle to describe their forward growth plan credibly, with achievable timeframes and appropriate budgets in place. However, when they do so, the exploitation plan also becomes a business plan, investment proposal and enabler of new grant applications. The client quoted above finished a project with one funder on a Friday and started another one with IUK on the Monday. They then won a second grant, and went on to win two more.

Grant managers help you to finish on a high and get noticed higher up in IUK. This can make it easier to win follow-on grants, or secure high profile PR by being featured in the annual report or being invited on a trade delegation.

Delivering value

Maximising the value of grants by moving it across budget headings, and utilising specialist funding pots, can be worth as much as 10% of the overall value of a grant. That means you can buy in specialist support for the entire project duration and it will normally pay for itself in the form of identified savings or time-efficiencies. Feel free to get in touch so we can work out how to support you too.

About Sean

Sean McDougall is a highly experienced consultant supporting clients through every stage of the innovation cycle. Having helped to launch the Double Diamond as an innovation team leader at the Design Council, he has worked with Innovate UK since 2008 on over 170 projects, including the 2019 Eureka Innovative Project of the Year. During that time he has also won tens of millions of pounds in grants for his own businesses and clients. His grant programme management support includes clients in sectors as diverse as SEN, cyber security, clean energy and the music industry.

If you require support in this field and would like to know more. You can contact Sean Directly at sean@seanmcdougall.co.uk