How to Organise Grant Contests

Have you ever had any great grant contest ideas? Do you know how to organise a grant contest and succeed? Here at Judgify, we know that grant contests are a powerful tool to support businesses, foundations, and public organisations that in turn finance cool social projects and volunteer initiatives. That’s why we’re ready to share our knowledge and experience about small business grant contests. Keep on reading!

What is a grant contest?

For those who don’t know, a grant contest is a competition in which grants are given out in cash or another form of financing to enterprises, organisations, and individuals dedicated to scientific or other research, development, training, treatment, and other purposes, followed by an obligatory report on their use. You may come across the following:

• Business grants
• Education and foundation grants
• Grant contests
• Awards for students
• Awards for environmental educators, etc.

Organisers of seminars or internships in another country or region may also provide grants on trip coverage. Travel expenses for those invited to a conference or any other event? No problem!

Reasons for running a grant contest

Learning how to run a grant contest is another issue you will likely face. No matter what you organise, the World of 7 Billion: Student Video Contest or Mayor’s Environment Expo: Eco-Leaders Program,  there are numerous reasons to arrange grant contests like these as much as possible as these events are supportive and aim to do good.

Grant contests support projects that are open to all middle and high school students worldwide, for environment protection, for animal rights, and for other nonprofit organisations. There are contests for scientists and medical research as well as CSR and peacemaking.

There are small business grants for women, start-ups, individual enterprises, and inventors. Raising capital is undoubtedly a big part of their job, and grant contest participation will be the best opportunity for that.

A good event specialist will have the expertise for grant contest management, even though it’s not a hugely popular event across the whole event industry. The point is, it’s still prestigious. When someone asks to organise a grant contest, don’t dismiss the idea. Just keep in mind that the competition for grants is very high. Your event company will have a chance to stand out and benefit with the smart use of high-tech contest management software.

How to organise a grant contest step by step

We also have some advice on how to organise a grant contest through an online contest and judging management app like Judgify. To come up with the perfect contest, you should take the following steps first:

• Set goals.
• Define requirements.
• Choose the venue.
• Pick a theme.
• Find sponsors.
• Set the rules.
• Define the judging criteria.
• Use grant contest tips.
• Come up with the contest promotion ideas.
• Choose prizes.
• Make a contest announcement.
• Invite judges.
• Optimize awards process management workflow.
• Run a contest.
• Make reports, etc.

After you set everything up, you’re welcome to choose the best event marketing platform, build a perfect contest landing page with a strong CTA, and start your registration process strong. Also, check out these top grant contest ideas.

5 great grant contest ideas

Here’s a list of the top grant competition ideas to kickstart your biggest idea—from the largest budgets to the smallest ones.

• Run a $200 million renewable energy startup contest the way GE’s Ecomagination Challenge did:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) Startup Challenge and $50,000 in cash:

• Organize a $250,000 contest for clean technology startups like Clean Tech Open:

• Run prestigious venture capital contests the way MIT did in its $100K Entrepreneurship Competition:

• PITCH: Women 2.0 Startup Contest in 2010 was also a good literal ‘pitching’ grant contest:

How to judge & how to find judges

Finding awards judges is not as easy as you may think. Nevertheless, the modern-day event industry allows for several ways to find and invite qualified judges to a grant contest:

• Via e-mail
• With a printed invitation
• Through an event judging module
• All of the above-mentioned ways at the same time

Thus, you can create an invitation letter or e-mail asking potential judges to preside over your awards or grant contest.

Build an evaluation system to assess each project by the largest possible number of industry experts but on a single scale. Ratings from 100 experts on a three-point system are better than three experts on a 100-point system, right? We recommend three points as an ideal rating system.

It is also essential to provide an opportunity for the judges to skip the project. In this case, the voice of the expert should not be taken into account when calculating the average score.

You must strive to ensure that each project is evaluated by at least 12–15 experts to make your grant contest fair.

Tips for contest organising

Planners should define the grant contest reasons, purposes, and criteria for judging a grant contest carefully to organise and run contests successfully. Here’s what we do to succeed:

• Keep competitions focused.

Mind that the major event actors—projects, investors, and jury members—all tune what they do to meet the mutual objectives.

• Make the contest an open enterprise.

Try to maximise the geographical spread of the participants, even with low grants.

• Enter different categories for projects.

You should come up with at least two categories, depending on the degree of the project maturity. For example, if a project does not yet have any revenue, you can call it a seed project, while projects with smaller amounts of income could be called startups, and well-financed and stable organisations are corporations, etc.

• Provide a clear and well-described motivation structure.

For participants, categories, judging criteria, rules, and other conditions should be clear, unambiguous, and explained well.

• Make applications easy to  submit.

Needless to say, this is why we use online registration platforms to organise successful and flawless application submissions.

• Make applications easy to evaluate.

The same is true about processing submissions.  An automated system makes the application form easy to fill in and send out!

• Control all assessment stages.

To stay objective, never interfere with the grant contest flow. Instead, assist and make it easy and fruitful for all participants.

• Always collect feedback and create a community around your contests.

Organising a grant contest is impossible without a thorough follow up and the ability to make friends. Your motivation is to help your services become even better.

• Finalize the competition.

The final step is the main contest stage. Invite all participants, experts, investors, partners, and even those you are not familiar with; meet them and organise maximum communication both online and on site.

Don’t forget to look through the grant contest checklist once again:

1. Think of awards criteria, contest rules, etc.
2. Invite judges.
3. Offer prizes.
4. Use humorous/entertaining elements.
5. Reflect the company’s brand.
6. Offer innovations/solutions.
7. Follow up and report.

Use the grant contest guide if you are still lacking  any winning grant contest ideas. To have some clue about professional contest building, use a creating-an-event support page.

Conclusion

By means of grant contests, you target education and foundations the most. Try to keep in touch with the grant contest participants, and follow the dynamics of their project development at the end. Firstly, it is interesting. Secondly, success stories and case studies of the finalists and winners will contribute to your reputation and company prestige. The primary criterion you will be judged upon is the effectiveness of the event and your expertise in how to judge a grant contest via grants management software fairly and run it successfully.

Good luck!

.