It may seem strange to be writing about impact at the stage of a funding bid. You may not even have started a project yet, so how can you write about impact? This is one example of the importance of planning your impact from the very earliest stages of your project, and it can make the difference between winning a bid or missing out.

My first piece of advice would be to read our post on Setting Impact Goals. You won’t be able to convince a funder that you have thorough impact plans worth their investment if you don’t know for yourself what your goals are.

Carefully read the call. Some calls will be very explicit in their expectations around impact, whilst others will be less clear and may use different terms. Terms like “value for money”, “regional/national importance” or “strategic priorities”, for example, can indicate that impact is expected from the project to be funded, even if the word impact isn’t explicitly used.

Consider how important impact is to the call, and how much space in your bid should be dedicated to this. If there is one vague reference to impact, much less focus on impact would be expected than a call dedicating a whole paragraph to ideas of “national importance” and “strategic priorities”.

Even if impact isn’t required, it can be valuable to mention it. In two otherwise like bids, plans to generate impact might swing the decision in your favour.

Include impact throughout your bid. To use the UKRI bid structure as an example, you should include your intended impacts in the vision, your planned pathways to impact in the approach, the team’s previous impact achievements in applicant and team capability to deliver, and resources required to achieve the impact in the resources and cost justification. While you should include consideration of your impact throughout the bid, ensure that it is proportionate to the importance of impact to the bid as a whole.

Be realistic with your aims. Think about the scale of the project, time frames, experience, and amount of funding. You can be optimistic about your aims, but make sure that they are achievable within the scope of your project.

Be realistic with costs and resources. If you have made grand claims for impact and not appropriately costed the resources required to achieve them, this could affect the perceived viability of the whole bid. Likewise, if you’ve made little reference to impact throughout your bid but claim large costs will be required to achieve this, it may raise questions.

Our guidance on Embedding Impact into Bids provides more detail on what to consider and prompts for planning and writing impact in bids. If you have questions, please check the RIS Applying for Funding Intranet pages or contact ris@port.ac.uk. Remember that an Intention to Apply form should be completed for all applications for external funding at the University of Portsmouth.