How to win a grant

Important information about grants

What is a grant?

“A grant is where a sum of money is given by an organisation to another for a specific purpose.”

The key piece of wording here is the grant is provided for a specific purpose.

A common mistake clubs make when applying for grants is that their application does not fit the purpose of the grant so it becomes automatically ineligible.

It is really important that you and your club take the time to understand what the grant provider is trying to achieve and then tailor your application to meet their needs.

Why are grants offered?

Organisations will offer grants for many reasons. The most obvious reasons will relate specifically to sport and include:

• Club development, leadership and governance training and development
• Uniforms
• Travel for competitions
• Facility Improvement
• Increasing participation

Sports clubs are also able to apply for grants which may not seem to have a direct link to sport but with a bit of creative thinking clubs can successfully apply for grants that seek to:,

• Increase community development
• Inclusion of minority groups such as people with a disability or CaLD groups
• Economic development – these are great grants if you are considering running a major event that will benefit the wider community
• Development of community facilities and infrastructure

If your club has a need then they will almost certainly need a grant.

One thing to keep in mind though is that grants are generally only open for a short period each year. It is absolutely crucial to allocate a person in your club who has the specific responsibility of monitoring grants and ensuring you don’t miss out on applying for grants that are suitable for your club.

The best way to do this is to register for the Sports Community newsletter which lists currently open grants.

Finding the right grant

You’ve come to the right place for grants listings!

Each week we comb our library of more than 100 grant providers around the country to see what grants are open, and we list all these under the grants tab

We endeavour to list grants from all grant providers but with more than 500 local councils in Australia so we simply don’t have the resources to cover them all, so when looking for a grant check with your local council as well as the Sports Community grant listing and email newsletters.

Grants can be very competitive

Many grants go unallocated because of a lack of applicants. However, many grants are highly sought after.

It is also not uncommon for the larger grants to have hundreds or even thousands of grant applications so sometimes, no matter how good your application is, you may not be successful.

For example, in its first year the Australian Sports Foundation’s Giving4GrassRoots grant had more than 900 applications but only gave out 34 grants, so there were a lot of good applications that missed out.

So, while understanding that grants are highly competitive, the challenge is to give you and your club the best opportunity while minimising the time and most importantly the stress involved in creating your grant application.

You will quickly see the actual completion of the grant application doesn’t take that long, more time is often taken collating supporting material. Once you have everything together the first time it becomes a lot easier after that to submit grant applications. The more grant applications your club makes the better it will become.

Who provides grants?
Another common mistake is that grants are provided only by government and while it is true that the major providers of grants for sports clubs are the three levels of government:

• Local councils
• State governments
• Federal government

Grants are also offered by many other organisations including:

• Other government agencies
• Philanthropic trusts and foundations
• Commercial organisations

Crucially, we know that many grants are over subscribed but just as many, especially the council and less well-known grants, don’t get enough applications to give out all their available funds.