How to make your Jisc funding bid stand out from the crowd

Sarah Porter, Jisc director of innovation, said: “We want to attract bids from a wide range of universities and colleges, those that know Jisc well and others that might be bidding for the first time or need additional help with their application. We know bidding for funds is a time-consuming process and we are therefore aiming to give organisations the best possible chance of being successful in their applications.”

More useful resources:

Find out what you can bid for now and sign up for funding updates

Read a briefing paper about applying successfully for funding (PDF)

Read a blog post from Joss Winn on his experience of writing Jisc bids

Find out more about what Jisc is looking for in grant bids

Find out what we’re looking for from responses to tender invitations

Are you a college? Your regional support centre can give you advice on writing an effective bid.  Find your nearest representative

Jisc advice for successful bidding includes:

• Describe how your proposed project meets the criteria set out in the call
• Demonstrate how your idea  is aligned with the objectives of your college or institution, including what buy-in you have from senior management
• Carry out an initial assessment of the risks of undertaking the project – and then mention this in your bid
• Include an initial project plan and show how the project will be managed
• Think ahead – include information about dissemination, embedding and evaluation mechanisms
• Show that your project is sustainable once the funding has ceased – not just financially but also in terms of the skills sets of the people involved, and any data/software preservation
• Go green – show that you have considered the environmental impact of your project, eg. server power and data storage space you need
• Consider the wider benefits of the project  for UK education and research to show that your project is good value for money.  You might think about generating workshops, briefing papers or web pages to help disseminate the findings of your project more widely
• Check you understand Jisc’S position on IPR and that your bid is in line with this
• Don’t let your bid fail on the easy stuff: make sure you stick to the page limit and get your bid in on time

Dominic Tate, repository and digital assets manager at Royal Holloway, university of London, who has compiled advice on successful Jisc funding bids, said: “I would recommend an email or telephone call to the contact at Jisc to sound them out about whether your idea for a bid is in scope for the call for funding. I would also recommend that you ask someone else outside your immediate team/colleagues to review a draft of your bid and give you feedback on the clarity of what you are proposing to do and deliver.”

Joss Winn, senior lecturer at the University of Lincoln who has managed a number of Jisc projects, said:  “When I write a bid, it is a somewhat open, collaborative process that proposes to formalise and build on work that we’re already doing and what we already know. I know that this is not uncommon and is not a guaranteed ‘secret to success’, but it is worth underlining.”

He adds: “Bid writing can be a useful  reflective exercise - rather than simply 'bidding for money', it's part of the overall narrative of the project itself that starts with the bid and ends with the project outputs and papers.”