Context
House of Europe runs cultural grant opportunities in Ukraine for artists, educators, and NGOs. They needed more applicants and wider reach.
Diagnosis
Grant programmes get written by people who understand grants, for people who don’t.
You end up with tabs, vague eligibility rules, formal language, and: if you have never applied before: the quiet suspicion that you’re already doing it wrong. Grants can feel hostile to first-timers in a way nobody inside the programme ever notices.
That isn’t a reach problem. Somebody who arrives, reads for four minutes, and decides this isn’t for them has been reached perfectly well. The gap sat between arriving and applying, and most of it was in their head.
Entry-level opportunities existed but weren’t surfaced, so a newcomer met the full catalogue including things they had no chance at, and drew the obvious conclusion. The three audiences also needed different things, an artist, a university educator, and an NGO hesitate for entirely different reasons.
Decisions
- Restructured the information so entry-level opportunities came first, and a newcomer’s first impression was something they could actually win
- Segmented the communication for artists, educators, and NGOs
- Cut the effort needed to work out whether an opportunity applied to you
- Built a reusable playbook instead of a one-off campaign
- Made first-time applicant conversion the metric, since repeat applicants were never the group getting stuck
Results
First-time applicant conversion up 22% in the pilot, and information search time down 40%.
The programme also got a communication model it could reuse for future rounds, which outlives everything else here.
The tricky part is that institutional language exists for a reason. Eligibility rules carry legal and financial consequences, and every simplification risked implying something untrue. We negotiated that line sentence by sentence.
The programme was already reaching the right people. The 22% came from removing the reasons they decided the opportunity wasn’t for them.