Hello Mike,
my club tried for a lottery grant but we also got turned down, we believed it was because it was at the time of the Olympics. One thing we did do though was get in touch with our local town council who had someone who could go through the application with us and show up one or two ponts that we managed to strengthen. It took me weeks to fill the damn forms in and as I said at the end we got turned down but what it did do for us was show us other avenues that we coild explore (which we did 0 and eventually we got the grant amount that we wanted ,just from a different source.
Hope this helps.