How to apply for a grant

In order to apply for a grant you need to first ensure you are eligible for support.  Check you meet the criteria, check the submission deadline, and understand what you need to have in place in order to apply for the grant.  Usually in capital grants you are required to follow a procurement process for the items you want to purchase.  This simply means you need to get quotations for what you want to buy from suppliers and follow some guidelines around emailing them for a quotation, and showing the email trail where they reply with their quote on headed paper.  The grant will specify how many quotations you need to get, and please ensure you source suppliers for the same specification of product.  Funders prefer 'like for like; quotations.  This means each quote should detail the specification for the item you are purchasing, with features and details, such as a laptop with a 17" screen, 256 gb of ram, 1 TB of memory, with a 1.5 intel processor.  You would ask each supplier, (or search online) for that exact specification of Laptop.

Funders will ask questions about your business performance, who you customers are, how this project (purchase of a laptop/equipment) will impact growth in sales, productivity, environmental impact, innovation of your service etc, and your application will detail and quantify how your business performance will be impacted.  Will you grow your sales,  will you improve your productive time by being more efficient with a better piece of equipment,  will your service be more environmentally sustainable, as an output of the project.  This will often be backed up with financial projections, research findings or impact statements.

When your application is submitted you will be asked to confirm that you have the ability  to purchase the items within your project before you can claim back the grant assistance, so check the claim process of the grant in advance.