Grant opportunity guidelines

Australian practice puts everything in one document. The grant opportunity guidelines state who may apply, what is funded and what is not, how much money is available, the assessment criteria and their weights, how decisions are made, and what the agreement will require. If a question is not answered there, it is generally not answered anywhere.

This is a genuinely different information architecture from the European one, where a topic fiche points to a work programme which points to general annexes which point to a model grant agreement. Australian applicants read one document; European applicants assemble four.

The assessment criteria in the guidelines are the criteria the assessors score against, in the order given and with the weights given. Structuring the application to mirror them is not a stylistic choice. Assessors work through them in sequence, and an argument placed elsewhere may have no box to be scored in.

European applicants under-read them because they look like a summary. They are not: they are the operative document, and the entity is bound by them under the Commonwealth rules.

Read the eligibility section and the "what we do not fund" list before anything else. Australian guidelines are unusually explicit about exclusions, and those exclusions are applied literally rather than interpreted generously.