now you've been hearing about the background of putting your project together what I'm now going to be talking about for the next 50 to 55 minutes is the process of writing the words so this is excellence in EU project proposal writing and if I know where the machine is here we go right now before I start on this process I'm going to give you a mapa because we talked yesterday about fp7 and I gave you some information yesterday about how difficult it is it's up here compared with where you are which is generally speaking at the beginning so what I thought would be useful for you rather than you become dismayed that writing project proposals is difficult I thought I would give you what I've called the mapapa for you to gradually get the skills that will be needed for you to be able to write at the end of the process a proposal for framework program 7 or PR framework program eight by that time so what you need to do as boska was saying in one of his earlier slides is identify exactly where you want to go what sort of opportunities do you want to develop to write into a project proposal so your plan would be to start with strategic development of the company that you're representing where does a country the company want to go in the next 5 or 10 years once you have established that that will give you the range of options available to you for writing project proposals identifying opportunities for you to take part so for that you would need to have boska has already mentioned a SWAT analysis is a simple way of establishing exactly where you are and where you want to get to now I talked yesterday about establishing a network the the most effective way of you being involved in projects with other partners is to be invited by other partners to join a project proposal so you need to start by developing your networking skills and registering your company on the Cordis website which some of you did yesterday that is an excellent start now small scale projects you could possibly get from the ministry very frequently there are calls for certain types of project proposal from the Ministries in Serbia there are also opportunities for small scale projects from other sources not the EU that we've been talking about and amongst the readings that you've been given for the course there is a list of opportunities for funding from other sources not the EU so that will often provide you opportunities for small scale projects 5,000 10,000 and so on so that gives you an opportunity of making a start learning how to write project proposals The Next Step Up might be an opportunity from one or other of the EPA component at the moment the most suitable one for you within the EPA scheme would be the crossborder cooperation but in the next few years other components of the EPA program will become available to you for regional development for human capacity development and also for Rural Development so there will be increasing opportunities for you to practice your skills at writing project proposals from EPA funds as I've said becoming a partner in somebody else's is fp7 or in the future fp8 project proposal is not a huge amount of effort once you have developed your network of contacts and then you could become the work package leader in another collaborative project so that you get management skills that will be essential for you to learn what is needed to run your own project and then finally fp7 or or in 5 or 10 years time we're now talking about fp8 where you would be in a position to write and to coordinate your own collaborative project with Partners from the rest of Europe now this process from the first step here to the top of this table here we're talking of 5 to 10 years so do not expect that this is going to happen overnight so with this as a framework for you to work towards I'm now going to give you some general information about the skills that you will need to implement for writing any one of these types of project proposal so here's the philosophy Philosophy for Success at writing project proposals the philosophy is generic which means that you can apply it to all types of project it doesn't matter where the money comes from it doesn't matter what the scale of your project is going to be or how many partners are involved it is independent of the subject or the topic so any of you would be able to write project proposals with the same philosophy it is independent of the funding source and it's independent to the program within the funding source and the philosophy is actually very simple in theory the challenge is to implement it so here's the philosophy for writing EU project proposals in general and it starts off with your objective is not to describe your good idea for a project by writing what you want to do but your objective is to convince them to give you the money you can have what you believe to be the best project in the world but if they don't give you the money for it then all that effort was for nothing so you've got to be aiming to make sure that you get the money so I'm going to be giving you words of advice on how you can succeed Ed in getting the money and you have to appreciate that there will be others also competing for the same money so why should they give the money to you when there will be many other good quality project proposals that they could select instead of yours so this is a concept that I find people here have difficulty understanding you've got to learn how to be competive itive so your philosophy is to learn how to be competitive and your philosophy is to make your proposal the best one that the evaluators are going to be reviewing so how do you make yours the best this is what I should be talking about for the next few minutes now Bosco showed you a slide yesterday and he said this this is the most important slide for today he was careful in his choice of words because he knows that I'm going to tell you that these two slides that you're going to see are the most important slides for today now they don't look very interesting do they no would somebody like to describe for me what they can see in this slide within the yellow box what can you see not very complicated let's start off with colors what color can you see that's [Laughter] col SLO CH okay so you can see let's call it blue right now what can you see that's blue let me give you a clue let's call it a bar each one of these is a bar how many bars can you see two bars to that's the start now are they the same no that's another that's a good good step forward right so what can you tell me about the differences between the two [Laughter] bars now then if I was to give you a ruler L year and to ask you to come and to measure it in centimeters would you you be able to tell me exactly how long the two bars are no neck right now why not they blurred they are blurred they sort of Fade Away into the distance car mler they disappeared into the F so that's the first graph right youve after a lot of encouragement you did event give me some information let's try the second one now this is similar to the previous one but there are some key differences what can you tell me that is different about this graph compared with the previous one fog disappeared the fog has disappeared OD lips up oh excellent CH now okay so there's no fog now that means that if I was to give you the tape measure L you could tell me how many cm the bars are that yes excellent now there's something else that is different between this slide and the previous one steps the steps yes you can see some steps joining the first bar to the second bar and I've actually you may not have realized but I've actually put an axis on here as well so that you you could actually Define how big those particular steps are now those two slides are the key to success I shall explain what I mean by that in the next few minutes but these two slides what do you think they represent the two bars where we are now where we are now and where we want to be exactly now these two slides can be used to represent many situations many opportunities for example you could do a SWAT analysis and you could say this is where we are now this is where we want our company to be in five years time so this concept is actually extremely important for many purposes but I'm going to use it for the purpose of writing a project proposal so why did I show you those two slides in relation to project proposals well the answer to that is shown in this slide here you might think that this looks like one of the slides you saw tomorrow that uh yesterday like my mother going to a shop and asking for a tomorrow's loaf of bread apparently she did that when she was a little girl maybe I'm uh no I won't go any so one of the slides yesterday looked like this it's not actually the same Slide the same information is on the slide but I've moved it round slightly for for a reason that will become um clear in a moment so politicians politicians like to be in power they like to get votes but they also develop policies policies to if you like to overcome the challenges that we talked about yesterday morning so politicians will develop the policy the policy is then implemented through the European Commission in Brussels mainly and they will develop funding programs and the funding programs will be for the purpose of beneficiaries and the funding programs need to have impact to keep the politicians happy now when I say impact in fact what I really mean is impact because the more impact their funding opportunities have their funding programs have for their beneficiaries then the happier the politicians are going to be now funding programs are what we have been talking about for for the last day and a half and your project proposal is going to be requesting funds from one of those funding programs so here's your project now of course your project will have its own impact but your Project's impact has also got to contribute to their impact so when you're describing the objectives of your project that you want to carry out you need to make sure that your impact is going to contribute to their impact and their impact will always be stated in the policy documents for the funding program so their funding program will always say the objectives of the projects should be the following and they will say expected impact so your project therefore needs to have significant impact so you need to know how to convert this you recognize the first of those two slides this will be a fairly typical example of a proposal that's going to fail so here we have madler the bars disappearing into the distance that is because poor definition of the starting point in terms of a needs analysis poor definition of the finishing point in terms of the impact analysis and poor definition of how to get to the finishing point in terms of the activities so this difference between the height of the bars is what I have now called impact so you now need to make sure that you define your impact as well as you can so that's the first type of project proposal which is going to be unsuccessful your proposals which are G to be funded will look like this format for a proposal that's going to succeed it has got to be the one that gives the best definition of where you start from n definition of of where you will get to op net and also how you will get there clear definition of the steps up the ladder from the beginning to the end of your project so you will need to have description of the activities and evidence of progress very important feedback to demonstrate that your project is going to achieve its objectives now there's one more Criterion that you need to consider for a competitive project proposal and that's money how much money is your project going to cost and what you need to consider is the size of the impact that you expect your proposal to have divided by the cost now that's important for you to consider because in a competitive funding program there are likely to be other project proposals of a similar type to yours and if there are two project proposals which claim to have the same impact and yours is 30% more expensive than another one then surprise surprise they will give the money to the other project proposal so you do need to ensure that you give good value for money for your project proposal so your budget has got to be very realistic it has got to be carefully worked out so no hidden costs no money going into black holes because otherwise this figure here impact divided by cost is not going to be competitive how do you achieve that I've been reviewing project proposals from Serbian scientists for 3 years and it was clear to me as I was reading these proposals that Serbian scientists in general have problems in four areas so proposals that I've been reviewing have four types of problem the first one is that project proposers in general are unable to read and Implement instructions now you might think well we all read instructions it's obvious that you read the instructions and then you do what they say but you would be surprised how many people do not read and implement the instructions I used to think it was a particularly Serbian problem until I happened to have a a talk with the EU project officer at Newcastle University during one of my visits and she said without any uh encouragement from me she said Steve do you know one of the biggest problems that I have with my scientists and that is that they don't read the instructions so there's nothing special about being in Serbia everybody has difficulty reading and implementing the instructions first problem second problem is that statements are made without any supporting evidence so evaluators they're not convinced because the evaluators need to see the evidence for your statements you say you have a long track record of successful project management but unless you provide the evidence to show that you have a long track record in successful project management they won't believe you so you have to provide the evidence for your statements insufficient detail is given of activities to be carried out to convince the evaluators of impact you might say that you're going to send somebody on a training visit to get skills in let's say um project management or research skills of of some sort now unless you provide the evidence that the person will come back with useful skills how will anybody know that that training visit is going to succeed and finally the text of different parts of a of a proposal is not consistent so the evaluators get confused now you will spend several months writing your project proposal but the evaluators will read your proposal in one day so how easy is it for you for you when you're typing the text of the impact at the end of your proposal on page 68 for you to remember exactly what it was you wrote six or seven weeks earlier when you were describing the concept of the project earlier on in the text so you have to make sure that you look for consistency in what you're writing now if you can avoid those four key problems you will succeed you will succeed in producing a good quality proposal that the evaluators will have difficulty rejecting so your target is to make it difficult for the evaluators to say oh it's not good enough now I'm going to give you some examples of these four criteria so the first one not reading and implementing instructions so you have to make sure that you do what they want you to do which means you read the instruction carefully and then you implement them and you have to read every page of the instructions read the eligibility criteria policy objectives and the impact expected for projects to make sure that you write what they are wanting you to say so do exactly what they say if it says maximum length one page for a particular section do not write two pages now you might think it's obvious if it says one page then I write only one page H it should be obvious but you would be surprised how frequently I was sent proposals from my scientists where instead of one page we had uh two pages three pages five pages I think the longest that I had was over 10 pages for this section where it says maximum length one page now you might think well it's not a big problem they're not going to reject my proposal because of that but for many funding schemes they advise the evaluators to ignore any Pages which are over the page limit so if you have written five pages for this section and your key argument for them giving you the money is on page three then I'm sorry to say that your proposal is not likely to succeed because you didn't follow the instructions so they should be easy to implement but the large majority of people do not do this so that's the first piece of advice uh just to give you an example of this I I had an exam that I gave to PhD students that I was teaching at the faculty of biology so these are supposed to be highly intelligent PhD students and for their exam they had to write a short project proposal and here are the instructions for one of the sections background information on your current research project and you and then here here's the advice that I gave them reading the words in red say what makes you a good researcher including a needs analysis to justify why you should be funded for an EU training visit and the last sentence is in italics to emphasize it but despite that over half of my students didn't say anything about themselves they just talked about the research that they were doing and they didn't follow the instructions to give information about themselves so no evidence for your statements here's another problem area be intelligent in implementing the instructions because every word of these policy documents has a meaning it is important so you need to make sure that you understand what those words are wanting you to write here's an example from an EU work program we have lots of text here blah blah blah blah blah boring boring do close cooperation with at least three Europe and outstanding partnering organizations now the italics is in the work program document that's put there by the European commission so I'll read those words you again blah blah blah blah blah close cooperation with at least three European outstanding partnering organizations now you need to know our three European partners are outstanding that's not going to give you the money you have to say outstanding wonderful here is all the evidence that you need for you to realize that they really are outstanding so you don't just write our three European partners are outstanding TKA full stop you have to give all the evidence you provide a list of their Publications the Nobel prizes that they've been winning all the measures of esteem that will show the evaluators that they genuinely are outstanding and not just ordinary partners so that's what I mean about understanding what is meant by the word and the document that boska referred to yesterday secrets to success that I was writing that document provides an explanation of what each of these words means in terms of what you need to write so you must remember to provide the evidence for your statements not sufficient detail now here's an example of text describing a training visit so compare two examples that I'm going to show on this slide here's the first one of our young R&D scientists will spend one month in Project year 2 at Institute X in Paris to be trained in how to use an ABC machine now you might think there's no nothing wrong with that is there it's clear what is planned now compare that with the following text it's a bit longer but it provides different type of information so our company currently has no ABC machine that we plan to buy one in Project year one as it is essential to develop the diagnostic tests of objective four thus one of our talented scientists will work in the Institute of Dr X in Paris for one month immediately before commissioning the ABC machine furthermore Dr X has used abc since 1998 and she has two machines one of which is regularly used for training visiting workers upon return to our company the young R&D scientists will help commission the new ABC machine and give training in its use to others to ensure dissemination and sustainability of the newly acquired expertise now I've put those texts in different colors the text in blue this is our needs analysis providing the justification for the training visit the text in Black back is a detailed description of the activity itself with the evidence to show that it's going to be good quality the person has been using the machine since 1998 so 13 years experience so obviously knows how it works two machines available one of which regularly used to train visiting workers here's the evidence that the quality of the training is going to be good and the final section in red here we have the impact analysis providing sustainability to that training visit so if you compare the two texts you can see that there's a lot more detail here that would provide the evaluator with the evidence that that step up the ladder is going to be successful so make sure you define the activities sufficiently to give the evidence that the objectives are going to be achieved not consistent I've said that's a big problem for many scientists and even I have trouble with consistency because it's taken me many weeks to type a proposal so I constantly have to go backwards and forwards backwards and forwards checking the words that I typed in the earlier part of my proposal so these are specific examples that have been taken from scientist proposals that I was reviewing if you refer to improving staff management skills as a project objective make sure you describe activities somewhere in the rest of the proposal to achieve this so this is what I found a list of activities on page three uh sorry list of objectives on page three then when I came to the description of the activities no description of work describing any training visits for staff management skills they had forgotten about it here's another one if you refer to a website dissemination activity at the end under project impact make sure your project website is already described in the previous section of the proposal again I was reading through that proposal and was surprised that there was no activity described to produce a project website and I thought oh it's unusual most people have a project website and then at the end on page 65 under project impact there was the statement that said and our project website will be a major source of disseminating information to our stakeholders and I thought oh wonderful so you are having a website after all it's a Pity that you didn't describe it in the text so remember consistency is very important now it's very easy to make these mistakes in consistency because you write the text bit by bit but the evaluators will read your proposal from page one to page 87 or however long it might be in probably just one day here is the expected impact for one of their policy documents for an EU research institution capacity building project so there's a whole series of impacts that they expect from your project and I've just put down three of them here here so focus on the text in in Red so for the first impact it's integration in the rest of the European research area longlasting partnership with research groups elsewhere in Europe now that's not going to be too difficult for you to describe you can set up some sort of networking collaborative research exchanging staff Personnel training visits and that sort of thing so that shouldn't be a challenge Improvement of participation of the applicant entity in EU fp7 projects again you can write some text for that without too much difficulty you can say our partner institutions will be able to help us to write project proposals for fp7 so that's not a problem let's read the last one though improve research capacity for increased contribution to Regional economic and social development economic and social development let's say you're working in x-ray crystallography in a faculty somewhere masinski faculty there was somebody here masinski faculty uh maybe it's not x-ray crystallography but let's say it's some particular technique and you're looking at some developing some theory for how to use particular type of metals for some purpose and you think well H how do I take my research to develop contribution to Regional economic and social development x-ray crystallography of the surface structure of uh niobium alloy with some other the metal oh dear right uh so you decide I'm not going to bother because I can't think of anything to say uh if you ignore that ignore any of these points and you don't get your pettitor you don't get the number five and it's 3 * 5 makes 15 and only if you get 15 out of 15 will they give you the money 14 and a half some people will get the money but other people with 14 and a half they won't get the money so you have to make sure that you have to write something here even though it might be a challenge for you to think how looking at using x-ray crystallography studying the surface structure of niobian alloy of some sort oh well it could be that it will have uh improved electrical properties for some sort of equipment that could be useful in it uh telecommunications technology let's say 5 or 10 years time and once this comes on the market then of course our products will be more competitive with our neighboring countries products which will lead to better Sal for the companies in Serbia and the region that are able to produce and sell more effectively and this will lead to better jobs for the local employment agencies so yeah I've invented it but you know it's what they're looking for so let's move on to a description of the work how much detail do you give and the answer is I don't know uh the answer because it will depend on you and it will depend on the type of project that you are writing I've got some examples there you need to adjust the amount of detail to give to describe the work or the task to be done according to the project scale and the type and your previous experience a small scale project for your first proposal which could be a staff training visit you would need to give more description of the Day to-day activities than a large International collaborative project by experienced staff because if it's your first project you need to provide the evidence by the words that you write you need to provide the evidence that you know how to manage a project and therefore you need to provide the evidence of the activities with more detail than would otherwise be needed so I've got some examples coming up here let's say you want to have a conference to discuss the issues involved in your project so this might be what you would write if it was a large scale International Consortium where the partners have regularly had intern AAL conferences so the evaluators would know that they have the skills to manage International conferences so we plan two stakeholder conferences to discuss the issues if space was limited that might be all that you can write now if you have more space more opportunity to give the detail you could say we plan a 3-day International stakeholder conference in Belgrade in year 1 and another 3-day event in niche in year 2 so there's a bit more detail to it then you could say who some of the participants in your conferences are going to be we plan to invite key Ministry representatives and EU experts so policy makers and experts to discuss the issues we plan to discuss key problems s of inclusivity on day one and to present potential Solutions implemented in EU States on day two so each of these is more and more detailed now you have to make the decision for yourselves how much detail is appropriate for your particular project proposal so you have to decide the level of detail but you have to convince the EV evaluators that your objectives are going to be achieved now I've talked about impact being very important I'm now going to to read for you three very short project proposals and then I'm going to ask you a question at the end so three sections for the project proposals the first is the objective of the project the second is a description of the activities and the third is the impact that the activities will have so I'm going to read each of these sections the objective of this project is to improve the media skills of our Senior Management staff so it's a project about improving media skills for management staff the activities we plan to have two we training courses in Media skills for all our Senior Management staff a simple statement of what they plan to do and the impact is as follows we expect this project will have a major impact on improving the media skills of our Senior Management staff simple statement we expect that there will be some progress now here's the second project proposal three sections the first first two sections are identical to the previous one so the same text for the objectives the same text for the activities but now the impact statement is different we are certain it's emphasized we are certain that this project will have a significant impact on improving the media skills of all our senior staff so it's a stronger statement than the previous one here's the third proposal again the text of part one is the same the text for the activities is the same but now under impact we have the following we are convinced that this project will have significant impact on improving the media skills of all our Senior Management staff and to be sustainable into the future oh I like those words much nicer so the question is which proposal will you give the money to none none so I've got none over there and I've got the third one over here so why would you give it to the third one well we are convinced and sign significant oh right you like the words convinced and significant yeah okay now you said none why why would you give it to none of them just because the evidence of the input missing measur of the input yes what what it means significant sustainable how we measure that okay now you see it was it it was unfortunately a trick question because that is the correct answer I wouldn't give the money to any of them that is because the text of these two parts of the proposal is identical the only difference is the choice of words under impact now you can be convinced you can be convinced that your project will succeed but you're not the one with the money you see you have to convince the evaluators that your project will succeed so it's not what you say is going to happen it is what the evaluators believe is going to happen and the evaluators can only make their judgment on what will happen by reading what it says here reading what it says here the rest of your proposal so you have to make sure that the text of your proposal provides the evidence for the evaluators to make their own judgment they're not going to believe your judgment I could claim that I'm going to get The Nobel Prize in five years time you know do you believe me come on be honest it depends you don't know much about me do you well no actually I'm lying I'm not going to get The Nobel Prize but you see there's nothing to stop me from writing that's in my proposal it's going to be so successful that I shall get The Nobel Prize in 5 years time but they will look for the evidence you see that is why it is important that you always provide the evidence for any statements that you make so you might say we have a long history of uh working with underdeveloped um difficult children let's say and we have many projects showing that we have been able to help them but if you don't provide the evidence in terms of a list of those projects and what the achievements of those projects were then the evaluators are not going to believe you so it's extremely important to make sure that you provide the the evidence that will justify your statement now I would actually use that text but without the words we are convinced I would just say this project will have significant impact as demonstrated by the activities that we described on page 27 for example so I would make that statement but then provide the evaluators with a reminder to the text earlier on in The Proposal that justified that statement so do you understand what I'm getting here so it's fine to use the words but you need to make sure that in addition to those words you give the references to the statements earlier on that justify it so we're getting near to the end now now you've already seen something like this uh from yesterday presentations by by boska considering impact most Serbian projects unfortunately look a bit like this they start from somewhere here where IMA IMA madley you know we got the money but we're not too certain quite what we're going to do with it um so we start somewhere here and during the pro the project well one or two years has gone by and it's now finished and the muggers a bit sort of higher up so probably something happened and then after the projects finished all the Consultants they go back home or they go to their next project in Bosnia or Croatia or wherever they go and then life here in Serbia gets back to normal and you find that in the long term most projects are back down here somewhere again with mlet now your project proposals have got to be different your project proposals need to look like this memma m you've done your needs analysis to justify why that particular project was essential for development of something for overcoming a problem of some sort so needs to have a clear starting point clearly defined activities will Define the impact at the end of your project so your project is going to finish up here somewhere with some progress but furthermore you need to provide the sustainability for your projects impact after the end so when the money stops you should have a mechanism in place that is self- sustaining it doesn't need constant new money to keep it going it should be something that will provide long-term sustainability with impact continuing after the project is finished so you need to be very careful when you're describing your project activities that you will get to the end of your project at this point Point here but it's not going to collapse after the project stops and go back down like it did up here you've got to provide a mechanism so that when the project itself stops the money stops the project activities will still continue in some way now we're getting there to the end of the course there's only another hour or so left and you're probably already looking forward to going home and relaxing having a drink sitting in front of the television and forgetting about all the struggles of having to listen to English now we are going to be finishing the course by putting you in the role of the evaluator and you've got no idea what's ahead of you it will be a challenge now the fact is that evaluators are limited in the time that they have to read proposals and as boska will explain there are sometimes huge numbers of proposals to be evaluated quickly and if yours is at the bottom of this big pile down here and it's already 4:30 in the afternoon and oh still got another three or four more to read oh dear then your text has got to be really stimulating your text has got to provide very [Music] clearly the main reasons why you should be given the money so you need to make sure that when you present your project proposal in the final format that it will be it will be easy to read easy to follow easy to understand so make sure that you use all the opportunities available in word processes by having numbers bullet points to emphasize use bold and italics lines to separate different concepts here's another here's a quotation taken from a publication to emphasize a particular point on the right hand side I've got a photograph to break up the text to make it a bit easier e to read here's a table providing information it's much easier to read and understand information if it's either in a graphical format or in tables rather than just writing lots of words because lots of words require your brain to think and at halfast 4 in the afternoon a lot of people's brains do not want to think so you have to we say you have to spe spoon feed them with the information so you've got to make sure that you present your text in a form that can be read and digested easily so at the end of this process once your proposal has got to the evaluators and the evaluator has read to the end of your text he or she should be saying the following this looks a good good quality proposal from proposers who have followed all the instructions this is a good idea clearly Justified and implemented with a convincing amount of detail it looks as if the proposed project will be managed competently and will have a significant impact this is what the evaluator has decided not what you say but this is the evaluator's decision and it also looks excellent value for money you remember that size of the bar divided by cost indeed it looks the best proposal that I have reviewed so the evaluator ought to be saying I recommend they are given the money and that's the only way that you can con succeed if they give you the money so it doesn't matter how good the idea is that you want to describe unless they give you the money then you're not going to succeed so if you remember those four key points that I was referring to reading the instructions providing the evidence for your statements sufficient detail for the activities and consistency so that the evaluators don't get confused then your proposals will be good quality and they're more likely to get the money and and that is it