You have a project idea, but shy the effort to find an appropriate call among hundreds of calls and in hundreds of programmes? You know of the potential of EU Funding, but are busy with your daily work? Qualified projects offer many opportunities to widen professional knowledge and to implement innovative products and services. EU Funding is a good opportunity to implement large projects with a small own budget and to “go international“. However, project proposals are very time-consuming. Each of them follows specific rules concerning the form, content and budget. Proposals must fulfil all criteria if they want to be successful, and proposal writers fear the large time effort and the low success rates in proposals. However, certain principles of strategy and wording and implementation and management of projects prevail in all proposals and can be transferred to the specific project programmes.

The proposal writing course teaches strategies of project conceptualising, partner search and proposal writing. An overview of the actual EU Funding scene is given,  and it is discussed, how the EU functions „behind the scenes“. In a practical part, ideas of the participants will be discussed, together the participants will compose a potential proposal abstract, that withstands the five key criteria of project success given by the EU evaluation. The group work will open a dynamic discussion, trigger the exchange of experiences and strategies for the competitive proposal, it will lay  the foundations to own proposals,

Contents:

The European Funding Scene (Overview, Stay up-to-date), useful websites  
Funding Rate and Cost Categories
From Project idea to Funding Programme
From Project Idea to Partner search
Partner-Search-Strategies
Partner-Search-Abstract
Important issues for proposals (documents, the small prints and footnotes)
The evaluator’s eyes
Behind the scene (Strategic considerations, the Five Key Questions)
What are the parts of a competitive Proposal?
Which Skills do we need for a competitive Proposal?
The One-Page-Proposal
Time Management and Strategies for Proposal Writing
Submissions- the traps
Templates and Checks

The Method:

Focuses on lectures on one hand and group work on numerous exercises on the other hand, with a one-to-one-assistance and detailed discussions to work through the exercises. Case studies and work on templates will complete the course.

Target Group:

Project Managers and coordinators, project sponsors, group leaders and work package leaders, experts in projects and all people interested in project management ideas and tools. They should have some basic experience in working in projects or should have accomplished a basic course on Project Management. Openness to other experts and networking is also part of the course.   ( back to start )