Glossary
Key concepts in strategic grant design. These terms reflect the methodology and principles behind Grantivity's approach to funding.
Future Foresight
A structured approach to identifying emerging funding priorities before they become competitive. Future Foresight analyses policy trajectories, research agendas, and funder portfolio shifts to anticipate where resources will flow 12 to 24 months ahead. The goal is not prediction but strategic positioning: arriving with a clear proposal before the field becomes crowded.
Fundable Futures
Areas where societal need, policy direction, and available funding intersect but where few applicants have yet positioned themselves. Fundable Futures represent the strategic output of foresight analysis: specific thematic spaces where funders are beginning to allocate resources. Identifying them early creates a structural advantage that no amount of last-minute proposal refinement can replicate.
Design Thinking
An iterative, human-centred methodology applied to proposal development. In the context of grant design, Design Thinking means starting with empathy for what reviewers need to see, prototyping narrative structures, and testing each draft against the evaluation framework before submission. The process is explorative rather than linear, discarding weak arguments early and building on genuine strategic clarity.
Grant Design
The application of design methodology to the development of funding proposals and grant strategies. Grant Design treats a proposal not as a compliance document but as a designed artefact: structured, argued, and built around what reviewers actually need to evaluate. It is conceptually distinct from traditional grant writing, which focuses on filling templates rather than constructing compelling strategic arguments.
Systemic Matchmaking
A structured approach to aligning an organisation's strengths, capacities, and strategic goals with the explicit priorities, implicit preferences, and structural requirements of funding instruments. Systemic Matchmaking maps these dimensions against each other to identify where genuine alignment exists. The outcome is a shortlist of instruments where the probability of success is structurally high, not a long list of calls that happen to be open.
Funding Diversification
The strategic distribution of an organisation's funding base across multiple instruments, sources, and mechanisms to reduce dependency on any single funder. Diversification maps the full landscape of available options including EU programmes, national research funding, foundation grants, impact investment, and hybrid financing models. The goal is resilience: ensuring that the loss of any single instrument does not threaten the organisation's core mission.
Institutional Readiness
The degree to which an organisation is systematically prepared for sustainable grant acquisition. Institutional Readiness encompasses legal eligibility, administrative capacity, internal structures, and funding expertise. Without it, even strong project ideas fail at the application stage because the organisational foundation cannot support a competitive proposal or the obligations that follow a successful award.
Impact Pathways
A strategic framework that identifies the directions through which an organisation creates change: growth of the organisation itself, external replication, deepened presence in a community, or systemic structural transformation. Impact Pathways serve as a funding strategy tool, helping organisations articulate not just what they do but how their work translates into measurable, fundable outcomes at different scales.
Pathway to Impact
The logical chain connecting project results with expected outcomes and broader societal, economic, or scientific effects. In competitive funding programmes such as Horizon Europe, the Pathway to Impact is a mandatory section of the proposal. It demonstrates that a project's outputs will not remain isolated findings but will be translated into real-world application through deliberate dissemination, exploitation, and engagement strategies.
Staged Grant Pipeline
A strategic approach to grant development that builds capacity incrementally: starting with smaller national or bilateral projects, developing a track record and partnerships, then scaling toward larger consortium-level funding such as EU programmes. The pipeline recognises that competitive funding is cumulative. Organisations that attempt to enter at the top tier without prior positioning rarely succeed against applicants with established project histories.
Value for Money
A universal evaluation criterion in competitive funding: the invested amount must stand in reasonable proportion to the results achieved. Value for Money is assessed by review panels across nearly all funding programmes and extends beyond cost efficiency to include the quality, relevance, and sustainability of proposed outcomes relative to the requested budget.
Social Investor
A funder who expects a measurable social return on investment, in contrast to the traditional patron model where giving carries no expectation of demonstrated impact. The Social Investor perspective has reshaped the funding landscape: proposals must now articulate not only what will be done but what measurable change will result, and how that change will be evidenced and sustained beyond the funding period.