Avoid These Common Mistakes When Applying For Business Grants

Business News

Applying for business grants can be an exciting way to secure funding without having to pay it back. However, the grant application process can be highly competitive, and even a small mistake can cost you a valuable opportunity.

Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, avoiding common errors in the application process is crucial to increasing your chances of success.

Let’s explore some of the most frequent mistakes applicants make when applying for grants:
1. Not Meeting Eligibility Requirements
One of the biggest mistakes applicants make is applying for grants without thoroughly reviewing the eligibility criteria. Every grant has specific requirements based on factors like location, industry, business size, or demographic background. If your business doesn’t align with these criteria, your application will likely be dismissed right away.

How to Avoid This:

Before you start the application, carefully read through the eligibility guidelines. If you’re unsure about your fit, contact the grant provider to clarify. Only invest time in grants where you meet all the required criteria.
2. Ignoring Application Deadlines
Timing is everything. Many entrepreneurs miss out on grant opportunities simply because they fail to submit their application on time. Most grants have strict deadlines, and late submissions are rarely accepted.

How to Avoid This:
Set reminders for important deadlines, and aim to submit your application well before the cutoff date. Rushing at the last minute often leads to mistakes, so give yourself plenty of time to complete the process.

3. Incomplete or Inaccurate Applications
Grant providers receive hundreds, if not thousands, of applications. Any errors or missing information can cause your application to be rejected without consideration. Common issues include failing to provide supporting documents, leaving sections blank, or submitting inaccurate financial information.

How to Avoid This:
Double-check your application before submission. Make sure every section is complete, all documents are attached, and your financials are accurate. Having a trusted colleague or advisor review your application is a great way to catch mistakes you may have missed.
4. Lack of Clear Goals or Impact
Many grants want to know how the funding will be used and the impact it will have on your business. A vague or unclear plan can hurt your chances, as grant providers want to see that their money will be put to good use.
How to Avoid This:
When detailing how you’ll use the grant, be specific. Outline the exact areas of your business the funds will support, whether it’s new equipment, marketing, or employee training. If the grant asks about potential impact, explain in concrete terms how the funding will help grow your business or benefit your community.
5. Failing to Align Your Business Mission with the Grant’s Purpose
Many grants are designed to support businesses with specific missions, such as women-owned businesses, environmental sustainability, or minority entrepreneurs. Failing to connect your business’s mission to the purpose of the grant could make your application feel irrelevant.
How to Avoid This:
Research the grant provider and tailor your application to highlight how your business aligns with their goals. For example, if the grant supports businesses that promote innovation, emphasize the innovative aspects of your business in your application.
6. Submitting Generic Applications
Using a one-size-fits-all approach to apply for multiple grants can be tempting, but it often leads to failure. Grant reviewers can easily spot when an application hasn’t been customized to their specific program, which can make it seem like you haven’t taken the time to understand their objectives.
How to Avoid This:
Personalize each application to reflect the specific grant you are applying for. While you may be able to reuse some information, make sure you’re clearly addressing the unique requirements, goals, and questions for each grant.
7. Neglecting to Follow Up
Some entrepreneurs think their job is done once they hit “submit,” but following up can be an important part of the process. Whether you receive a response or not, a polite follow-up can show your professionalism and interest in the opportunity.
How to Avoid This:
After submitting your application, follow up with the grant provider within a reasonable time frame. This could be a simple email inquiring about the status of your application or asking for feedback if you don’t receive the grant.
The bottom line is applying for business grants can be a game-changer for your business, but it’s essential to approach the process with care and attention to detail. When you avoid these common mistakes you can increase your chances of success. Remember, the key to winning a grant is not just having a great business idea but also presenting it in a way that resonates with the grant provider’s goals.

Osman teases Thursday Murder movie release window

Arts & Culture, Film & TV

Richard Osman has teased a release window for The Thursday Murder Club movie.The gameshow and podcast host appeared on Saturday Kitchen this weekend to talk about his latest book We Solve Murders, and spoke a little bit about the big-screen adaptation of his debut novel.Speaking to host Matt Tebbutt, Osman explained that he currently doesn’t know an exact release date, but has an inkling of a time frame at least.”Chris Columbus is editing it right now. So it should be next year, I would think,” he explained. “That’s cinemas and then, then on Netflix straight after that.”So I would think next summer, next autumn? I would guess, but I don’t know for sure.”NetflixRelated: Best books on AudibleOsman also stated that he wanted his fifth novel in the Thursday Murder Club series to be out in the spring of next year, as long as things go well. He’s already started writing the book, which he said will contain a little meta in-joke about the Thursday Murder Club movie.The Thursday Murder Club has assembled a strong cast, including Helen Mirren and Sir Ben Kingsley, while the legendary Steven Spielberg served as a producer. Osman recalled how the Jaws and West Side Story filmmaker visited the set, and left him completely starstruck.Giles-Keyte//NetflixRelated: The best movies on Netflix to watch right now “We just had that incredible presence. There’s certain people you meet where you go, ‘Oh my god, you’re Steven Spielberg’. It was so lovely seeing even the other actors were excited to be around him,” he explained.”I was able to say right at the end, ‘Thank you for everything you do and the joy that you’ve brought the world’. I left it at that. I never need to say another word because I just said thank you,” Osman added revealed.”If you think about how he has entertained us, the joy he’s brought, the stories he’s told us, the tears we’ve shed because of him, it’s nice to be able to stand there, shake his hand and say thank you.”The Thursday Murder Club movie will be released next year in cinemas before hitting Netflix.September 2024 gift ideas and dealsJoe Anderton is a freelance news writer at Digital Spy, having worked there since 2016. In his time, he’s covered a host of live events and interviewed celebrities big and small.
A big fan of TV and movies both mainstream and obscure, Joe’s main interest is in video gaming. Although particularly a PlayStation gamer, he plays across Xbox, Nintendo and PC/Steam Deck, and likes to keep tabs on many games he’s not got the time to play.
Joe currently does not use Twitter, but he only ever used it to tell people to watch the film Help! I’m a Fish (which you really should do).

Banned Books Week starts with mixed messages as reports show challenges both up and down

Arts & Culture, Books

NEW YORK (AP) — Two reports released Monday provide a mixed but compelling outlook on the wave of book removals and challenges as the annual Banned Books Week begins for schools, stores and libraries nationwide. The American Library Association found a substantial drop in 2024 so far in complaints about books stocked in public, school and academic libraries, and in the number of books receiving objections. Meanwhile, PEN America is documenting an explosion in books being removed from school shelves in 2023-24, tripling to more than 10,000 over the previous year. More than 8,000 were pulled just in Florida and Iowa, where laws restricting the content of books have been passed.The two surveys don’t necessarily contradict each other. The library association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has recorded 414 challenges over the first eight months of 2024, with 1,128 different titles criticized. Over the same time period last year, the office tallied 695 cases, involving 1,915 books. The ALA relies on media accounts and reports from librarians and has long acknowledged that many challenges may not be included, whether because librarians preemptively withhold a book that may be controversial or decline to even acquire it.

Challenges have surged to record highs over the past few years, and the 2024 totals so far still exceed the ALA’s numbers before 2020. Deborah Caldwell-Stone, who directs the association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, also cautioned that the numbers predate the start of the fall school year, when laws that had been on hold in Iowa will again be in effect.

“Reports from Iowa are still coming in,” she said. “And we expect that to continue through the end of the year.”

The library association defines a “challenge” as a “formal, written complaint filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.” The ALA doesn’t keep a precise figure of how many books have actually been withdrawn.

According to PEN, bans are tallied through local media reports, “school district websites, and school board minutes, as well as organizational partners” such as the Florida Freedom to Read Project and Let Utah Read. The library association relies primarily on local media and accounts from public librarians. And the two organizations have differing definitions of “ban,” a key reason their numbers vary so greatly. For the ALA, a ban is the permanent removal of a book from a library’s collection. Should hundreds of books be pulled from a library for review, then returned, they are not counted as banned, but listed as a single “challenge.”For PEN, withdrawals of any length qualify as bans.“If access to a book is restricted, even for a short period of time, that is a restriction of free speech and free expression,” says Kasey Meehan, who directs PEN’s Freedom to Read program.The ALA and PEN both say that most of the books targeted have racial or LGBTQIA+ themes, whether it’s Meir Kobabe’s “Gender Queen,” Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and “The Bluest Eye” or Jonathan Evison’s “Lawn Boy.” While some complaints have come from liberals objecting to the racist language of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and other older works, the vast majority originate with conservatives and such organizations as Moms for Liberty.

The Iowa law, passed last year in the Republican-controlled statehouse, bans school libraries from carrying books that depict sex acts. The law also requires schools to publicize its library collection online and provide instructions for parents on how to request the removal of books or other materials. Many districts already had those systems in place.After LGBTQIA+ youth, teachers and major publishers filed legal challenges, a federal judge in December put a temporary hold on key parts of the law, but it was lifted by a federal appeals court last month in an order that left room for challengers to seek a block again.Records requests filed by the Des Moines Register with Iowa’s 325 districts showed nearly 3,400 books had been removed from school libraries to comply with the law before it was paused. In Davenport, which is among Iowa’s 10 largest districts and serves more than 12,000 students, Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Kabobe’s “Gender Queer” and Morrison’s “Bluest Eye” were among the nine books taken out of circulation.

After the law passed, staff were instructed to review books in their care available to students, district communications director Sarah Ott wrote in an email.“If any books were preliminarily identified as potentially violating the new law, building staff referred the books to district administration for official review,” according to Ott. The district administration uses a process that was already in place to review materials and ensure compliance with the law, she said.

Banned Books Week, which runs through Sunday, was established in 1982 and features readings and displays of banned works. It is supported by the ALA, PEN, the Authors Guild, the National Book Foundation and more than a dozen other organizations. Filmmaker Ava Duvernay has been named honorary chair, and student activist Julia Garnett, who has opposed bans in her native Tennessee, is the youth honorary chair. Garnett was among 15 “Girls Leading Change” praised last fall by first lady Jill Biden during a White House ceremony.“We observe Banned Books Week, but we don’t celebrate,” Caldwell-Stone said. “Banned books are the opposite of the freedoms promised by the First Amendment.”___Associated Press writer Hannah Fingerhut in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this report.

Olivia Munn films John Mulaney cuddling newborn daughter after welcoming second child via surrogate

Arts & Culture, Film & TV

Olivia Munn filmed John Mulaney cuddling their newborn daughter after the couple welcomed their second child via surrogate on 14 September.The couple announced the birth of Méi June Mulaney in social media posts on Sunday, 22 September.”I love my little girl so much,” Mulaney, said as he explained that his newborn daughter’s name means “plum” in Chinese.The birth comes after Munn was unable to become pregnant after receiving treatment for breast cancer.Mulaney and Munn also welcomed a son in 2021.

Overlooked and underestimated: The untapped potential of business customers

Business News

In the US, residential electricity customers outnumber business customers by nearly 7:1. However businesses, including small-to-medium businesses (SMB) and commercial & industrial (C&I), will continue to have an outsized impact on progress towards our clean energy future due to their massive grid impact. The average business customer uses 11 times more electricity than an average household, presenting enormous decarbonization potential across energy efficiency, load flexibility, and building & vehicle electrification.

The non-residential sector in the US has a mind-blowing carbon footprint, emitting 2000+ MMT CO₂ equivalent each year, excluding transportation. To better illustrate this number, imagine over 5 trillion miles driven in a gas-powered car or the annual output of 519 coal-fired power plants.
The road to a decarbonized future must run through the business sector, but we won’t get there with business as usual. Current participation is low in today’s established utility energy efficiency programs, with just around one-third of businesses adopting common offers such as installing energy-efficient appliances or weatherizing their building.
The challenge lies in mobilizing businesses to take part in these programs. As the non-residential sector electrifies and drives even more load growth, the need for true partnership between utilities and businesses becomes even more important
Yet reaching businesses, particularly SMBs who often lack dedicated utility account management, is challenging. No two businesses are alike, with the segment including small mom-and-pop shops to large multi-site chains to industrial manufacturing facilities, and more in between. To make it even more complicated, within businesses of the same segment, they can have different hours, building types, energy needs, ownership type, etc. Business owners are typically stretched thin, leaving little time to interact with utilities.
The silver lining is that business customers are eager for collaboration, and utilities are ideally positioned to partner with them. Business customers are measurably more satisfied with their utility than residential customers (scoring 8.2 vs. 7.4 out of 10). They view their utility as a “trusted advisor” and are more likely to partner with them than any other ecosystem player. Utilities also have access to these businesses’ energy data and program offerings, enabling them to craft personalized clean energy journeys that benefit them.

The Missing Piece? Putting Business Customers First
We haven’t truly put these customers first by starting with a holistic picture of who they are and what they need. This means deeply understanding the end customer to engage and activate them. Too often we start with our own goals – “How do I get the customer into my program?” versus starting with the customer’s goals “How do I make sense of my energy bill? How can I save money on my bill without disrupting operations?” Or worse, we try to fit a square peg in a round hole by assuming residential solutions will meet business needs.
With the expertise of Uplight’s talented user research and design team, we set our preconceived notions aside and listened directly to business customers. Here are a few examples of what we learned:

Direct peer comparisons (“you used more than peer restaurants”), a tried-and-true motivator for residential customers, are not as meaningful to business customers. Instead, trend peer comparisons (“you did better year-over-year than peer restaurants”) help businesses benchmark much more effectively.
Business customers with multiple locations need an easy way to compare apples-to-apples data, such as usage per square foot, across their portfolio and see trends over time to understand where to focus their effort.
Energy expenses represent a significant cost for budget-conscious business customers. They are more inclined to take action than residential customers, but require utilities to show a quick path to return on investment (ROI). Personalization combined with an individualized ROI is a recipe for success.

Customer-centric Experiences = Better Business and Decarbonization Outcomes
Ironically, starting with the customer doesn’t just drive exceptional customer experiences, but also key business outcomes for the utility. According to Forrester Research, every dollar invested in User Experience (UX) yields 100 dollars in return. It’s important to recognize that driving utility outcomes is not solely an education problem, it’s a behavior problem. At Uplight,  we study the customer’s decision-making environment to design an experience that drives action. By improving the customer experience, we’ve seen utilities double the industry-standard engagement rates for energy efficiency program sign-ups, achieving their desired business outcomes. Taking this approach more and more will enable us to activate this critical segment at scale.
The icing on the cake: starting with the customer moves us faster toward our clean energy future. While the energy industry is often siloed – differentiating energy efficiency, electric vehicles, demand response, building electrification, and more – our business customers aim to better manage their energy and decarbonize holistically. By adopting the perspective of business customers, we can dismantle these silos and advance toward a clean energy future that benefits the utility, business customers, and the planet.

Jasper is open to visitors again — but what can tourists expect?

Travel

Landon Shepherd, sporting his yellow Parks Canada jacket and blue safety helmet, stood in a campground in Jasper National Park, beside a wooden pole with the metal remnants of a bear bin wrapped around it.Patches of green grass were starting to sprout on the earth nearby, juxtaposed against a desolate landscape of fallen trees and others standing like burned matchsticks. The trees lining the mountainsides in the background were torched too.”This was not green even a week ago; there were just a couple of odd plants. Since then, a bunch of things have sprouted up,” said Shepherd, a Parks Canada incident commander, while guiding a media tour through a couple of campgrounds on Sept. 7.”In a month and a half, we’ve already got really good ground cover — even in a site that was stripped so severely as this.”An immense wildfire — and the storm it created — swept through the national park nearly two months ago, burning accommodations, landmarks and attractions to various degrees. Eventually, the flames reached the Jasper townsite, destroying about one-third of its buildings.WATCH | Jasper re-opens to visitors — but what can tourists expect?: Radio Active7:57Jasper balancing act: rebuilding the community and economy togetherWe speak to Tyler Riopel, the CEO of Tourism Jasper, about responsible tourism.Recovery is ongoing, but visitors were recently allowed back into Jasper as well as several trails and day-use areas within the national park.Locals are welcoming visitors with open arms, but experts suggest it is unclear how tourism will be affected due to a lack of research into how they respond to wildfires. The tourists who do go, they said, should prepare for the area to look different from its photos, as it may take years for the town to rebuild and decades for nature to heal.The economy of Jasper, a town of roughly 5,000 people surrounded by the Rocky Mountains, relies heavily on tourism: Parks Canada annual reports show more than two million people visited Jasper National Park almost every year for the past decade — a fraction of whom are there for camping.Before the COVID-19 pandemic, international tourists spent more than $1 billion on the Alberta side of the Rockies, Statistics Canada data shows. Spending in the region has yet to reach such levels since the pandemic, but international tourists still spent more than $500 million in 2022 — the last full year of data available.”For those tourists who do go, know that you’re supporting a community in a time of need,” Michelle Rutty, an associate professor of geography and environmental management at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, told CBC News in an email.”Your dollars spent will have a meaningful impact in terms of supporting Jasper in its efforts to recover and rebuild,” she wrote.Tourist conductJasper Mayor Richard Ireland has described re-opening to tourists as a delicate balance essential to the town’s recovery. Premier Danielle Smith, on her radio show last weekend, encouraged people to visit the town.Residents were allowed home to start assessing their houses and businesses on Aug. 16, nearly four weeks after the evacuation order was issued. Some businesses are back in operation, while others may not be able to start up for a while yet.Business owners recognize the challenging recovery ahead and need tourists’ help, recalling how hard it was for some to get by from the local population alone during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.LISTEN | Jasper balancing act: rebuilding the community and economy together: Jasper re-opens to visitors — but what can tourists expect?1 hour agoDuration 1:55Government officials and some Jasper business owners are encouraging tourism, as the community has opened up to tourists again. Experts suggest it is unclear how a recent wildfire will affect tourism, but those who go should prepare for the area to look different from older photos.Yet, there are limited accommodations because the town has to house residents whose homes burned down.There is growing attention to wildfires and how they affect tourism. But there is little available research about how visitors perceive the risk and how they respond to such natural disasters, Rutty said. She noted that tourism was hampered last year in Kelowna, B.C., for example, due to wildfires — and the number of visitors hasn’t fully rebounded.Some existing research suggests that, for various reasons, people are split about whether to visit a place after a natural disaster. Some are apprehensive because they want to be respectful, while others may be unaware — or want to go because — something happened there.”You get this yin and yang,” said Lorri Krebs, a professor of geography and sustainability at Salem State University in Massachusetts.Burnt buses and cars were among the carnage in Jasper, Alta., after a wildfire reached the town in late July.

From business to beach trips, Babbel preps you for any conversation

Business News

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Whether you’re brushing up for a business trip, prepping for a vacation, or just looking to enhance your personal relationships, Babbel’s adaptive learning makes sure you’re progressing efficiently. No more outdated flashcards or clunky grammar books — Babbel adjusts to your learning style, so you can focus on what really matters.

It’s not just about learning phrases for travel, though. Mastering new languages broadens your global perspective and fosters cultural understanding. With access to 14 languages, Babbel is perfect for anyone ready to become a true global citizen.

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