Innovation Nottinghamshire: Structuring a Grant Application That Delivered

Krishnam took on the Innovation Nottinghamshire grant project as part of the Nottingham Consultancy Challenge during his MBA. The client was Sutton Youth Radio, a community radio station serving Nottingham and Derbyshire, which had been applying for a UK government grant repeatedly without success. The brief was to help them understand why they were failing and to produce a submission that would actually get through.

The grant documentation was extensive. Krishnam's first move was to break it into five distinct streams, identifying what each section was actually asking for and what evidence would satisfy it. He then looked at previously approved grant applications to understand the pattern of what worked.

His specific responsibility was the social value and community impact section. He had to demonstrate that Sutton Youth Radio would use the grant constructively and generate measurable social value according to the government's framework. The station's owner had been filling in the application himself but kept making the same structural mistakes, unable to connect the station's actual work to the framework's language.

Krishnam identified that the core failure was a narrative problem, not a factual one. The station was doing the right things but couldn't articulate them in the terms the framework required. He mapped each of the station's activities to the corresponding grant criteria, built the narrative around social value creation, and completed the submission.

The application was approved and Sutton Youth Radio received the grant.