Guidelines are goldmines

Guidelines are goldmines. I often say that guidelines are misnamed. They actually should be called rules, because they include information that you need to follow and that you need to do and be compliant with. If you haven’t seen a guideline document before, we’ve included a mock example we use in training for a download. So download that, and that’ll give you an understanding of a mock guideline. 

The other thing you could do, of course, is following. If you’re following along and developing your project and getting ready, getting grant ready to apply if you’ve found a grant, or go and find a grant and download a guideline document. Guidelines differ. There’s never the same guideline. If it’s a government guideline document, they do follow a very similar structure, but guidelines do differ between funders as well. 

One of the first things that we do in guidelines is we often get our highlighter out after we’ve printed them out. Or if you are more digital, you might do what I do and copy and paste some information into a short document, which we’ll show you an example in a minute, or you might actually then just make notes as you go through, annotate the PDF, for example. On screen is an example of the Australian Post guidelines document, where we’ve done exactly that. We’ve gone through when we’ve highlighted some key terms. 

One of the things that you should do with guidelines is read them, including those couple of pages at the beginning. Read those. I know this is such a simple thing. Read the guidelines, of course, but you would be surprised how many people miss things in guidelines. One sentence that they’ve included, such as the level of the insurance that’s required. If you’ve missed that and you are not compliant, you’ve just wasted all that all that time in applying. So make sure that you go through and you look at everything that’s included in those guidelines. What I like to do is I like to then start making a list of things that I need to do. So I’ll give you an example of the five key things. This is a table format you can download below, but these are five key things that I list or I put in a table format or in a spreadsheet. 

So what do we need at minimum? What’s the minimum requirements? An example I gave earlier was GST, ABN insurance. It could also be that you need to provide a letter of support. Let’s just say it’s for mental health training, and you need to provide a letter of support from a practitioner or a quote. There are a lot of things that you may be required to do. Start listing those now. It’s less likely that you’ll face stress when you get down to that deadline and apply. Things that we need to show or provide. So, for example, a funder might say, “You could include a project plan.” Well, guess what? If they’ve said we could, we’re going to include it because that’s going to give you a more competitive lens when compared with other applications. 

Things that you need to check, you might need to check something. And this is about either doing some research and finding something, or maybe it’s checking something with the funder, which goes into the fourth point, which is questions you have. These questions might be from the funder, sorry, might be to the funder, or questions that you might have of your team members or your partners or the beneficiaries. And then things like what you need to cost in. So through the guidelines, there might be certain things like reports you need to provide. That’s a cost. 

You might need to provide audited financial statements in your acquittal. So, again, that’s a cost you need to factor in. So as you’re going through the guidelines, writing down notes in these five areas will help reduce and avoid some common mistakes that are made. It is important. I’m just going to impress upon this compliance piece. Make sure that you can comply with the funder’s requirements. Check the guidelines, double check the guidelines, get it on your to-do list, make sure that you’ve got a document there that helps guide you to do that work. If there’s a sample contract, review that also. If there’s anything new that’s in the sample contract that’s not in the guidelines, you could ask them if that’s required. It’s better to know early than find out later. 

Also, check for comments about, in the guidelines, they might reference a policy, they might reference some legislation, those reporting requirements, and, of course, your acquittals. So guidelines also include general items that 99% of funders ask you to confirm compliance to. In many cases, some funders actually provide on the final page of the application, they provide a little bit of a checklist of things that you need to comply to. These are also called probity checks, so it’s really helpful to go and find that little checklist that’s in the application form. If it’s online, it’s generally right at the end before you hit submit, and just check those requirements as well.