Your application
To achieve a positive outcome from your road safety activity, you will need to plan carefully, budget appropriately, promote effectively and measure your results accurately. The Community Road Safety Grants Program is competitive and your application will be ranked against other applications. Here are some ways to help move your application higher up the rankings.
Before you start preparing your application ask yourself these questions:
Why?
- Why is this issue a priority?
Who?
- Who is part of my community? Who isn't?
- Who are the movers and shakers in my area? Who has influence?
- Who is at risk? Who can influence this target group best?
- Who will be involved in our project?
- Who should we talk to about our project?
- Who else in the community has an interest in road safety?
What?
- What is unique about our community?
- What makes our community tick? What are my community's interests?
- What events have shaped the area?
- What are we trying to achieve with this project
- What planning should we do?
- What skills do we need to run a successful project?
- What resources do we need?
How
- How are we going to fund this project?
- How do we get the community motivated and involved?
- How will the project be implemented?
- How can we successfully promote our project?
- How will we know we have achieved our goal?
Where?
- Where can we find the information we need to run a successful project?
- Where will we need to centre our activity
- Where does the community gather?
When?
- When do we want to begin our project?
- When will the project team meet and how often?
Finding the answers to these questions will help keep your project focused and achievable.
Work with others in the community
Working with others is essential for the success of community based programs. You should identify other groups in the community you can work with before preparing your application. Ideally you will include a representative of a road safety stakeholder in your area (e.g. your local council). Your application should reflect the ideas of this broader group of people and organisations, because you will all work together on the project.
Start with a group brainstorming session. Present information about the problem you want to address and your ideas for addressing it, then discuss alternatives, challenges you will need to overcome, and the best way forward. Develop a project plan and agree on roles. Only then will you be ready to prepare and submit your application.
Have a clear idea about your goals, objectives, and activities
The application form asks you to state the goal for your project. This is a single statement of your project's aim. It should be simple and clear, but also focused and achievable.
You must also describe your project's objectives and the specific activities you intend to carry out.
Objectives are the actual outcomes you expect from the project. You may have several objectives, but if there are too many, your project will become difficult to manage. Objective statements usually include words like 'improve', 'reduce' or 'develop'. It helps if objectives can be measured and evaluated.
Activities are the tasks you carry out during your project.
There are important links between your goal, your objectives and your activities. The best way to check if they are linked correctly is to ask HOW and WHY questions. The following example show how these links and questions work. WHY questions move you to a higher level. HOW questions move you to a lower level.
Example: Your project may be about providing new refugee arrivals or migrants in a local community with extra child restraint information through brochures supplied in their first language. This is the 'activity'. If asked WHY you wanted to do this, it was to increase the accessibility of child restraint information for newly-arrived community members. This is the 'objective'. If asked WHY you wanted to do this, it was to improve the safety of new arrivals' children when they travel in the car. This is the 'goal'. Through this example, you can see that
if you ask HOW questions from the top of the diagram, the 'objective' and 'activity' follow logically from the 'goal'.
When you develop your objectives
Ask yourself the following questions:
- What are we trying to achieve? Be specific.
- How can we measure this objective?
- How are we going to achieve this objective?
- Is this objective relevant to our goal?
- Can we achieve this objective within a specified time?
Keep your ideas and explanations clear
When preparing your application, make sure you communicate your ideas for your road safety project as clearly and concisely as possible. If you write in 'SMART' terms, everyone will be clear about what is to be done, how, when and why. SMART stands for:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Timebound
Allow plenty of time
You need to prepare a project timeline when preparing your application. This will help organise everyone involved in the project – but allow enough time for all the tasks that must be completed to make your project a success. A common mistake in developing projects is to allow too little time for planning activities and data collection, especially when you have multiple partners and/or complex issues that you are trying to address.