igor.razbornik It takes a wise man to learn from his mistakes, but an even wiser man to learn from others.
Zen proverb
In my past, I have written European projects like Leonardo da Vinci, Interreg, Horizon 2020 or Erasmus plus. In this article and video, I will show you what I learn from my failures and what you can not repeat them. My calculation shows that I was able to claim over 17 million Eur with my project applications.
So, what can the project manager learn from these numbers and 22 years of experience in preparation of EU projects?
Here are 8 tips which will make your projects much better!
- Your project proposal is a business idea
- it needs to be presented the same way as you would offer a business idea to investors.
- You need to show to evaluators that you know what is the problem and how to fix it!
- Evaluators are your buyers
- You are not writing the application for the EU commission.
- You are writing the application for the evaluators
- You need to make your application easy to read, not to have a lot of information
- Evaluators have their award criteria.
- Try to find them and
- answer the criteria in the same order as they appear in their guide.
- This will make an easier job for the evaluators and they will appreciate it with a good score.
- Use marketing techniques when writing your proposal
- You need to apply marketing techniques while writing the application text to win the hearts of evaluators.
- Prepare a very good introductory sentence; it needs to implant the idea that this project needs to be funded!
- Make a complete plan of the project before you start to write the application
- Before even starting to write the text in the application!
- This will make your project clear and shorten the time for the preparation
- Your EU project needs to provide a great value.
- You will say that this everyone knows. Maybe, but they do not behave like knowing this when they write their application
- You need to tell evaluators how the world will be better after your project will be funded.
- If not, you are just begging for the money!
- You cannot fail!
- Winning EU projects are a repetitive process.
- If you fail the first time, next year you will make the application better
- And you need to develop another one next year
- That way you will second-year apply two different projects
- You will learn the process, but all of your learning will have the result
- Proposal writing is a science:
- 90% of people have good project ideas, but they don’t know how to explain and write the application.
- Learn persuasion techniques and how to transfer the information in a short time in the writing form; you don’t have the possibility to explain the project in person
- Invest time to make your project preparation better.
You can see an explanation of these statements in the following video (optimized for smartphones, click on 
to enlarge the video).
In the next video, I will explain what tools I use to make easy to follow process out of these teachings and seamlessly put it into the practice of preparation of EU application.
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Did I miss something? Tell me in the comments.