Grant proposals are marketing documents that pitch what is envisioned for the future. They are also historical records of sorts, taking stock of recent projects and accomplishments. They are also profiles of an organization’s capabilities and capacities, that is, claims about what an organization has done, knows how to do, and has the resources to do again. Grant writers are not fiction writers. They are supposed to write clearly and persuasively, but they are not supposed to finesse the proposal’s language to such an extent that it becomes untrue. And yet, most grant writers have experienced being asked to “massage” unfavorable facts into preferred ones, or have seen their fact-based prose reworked by others into something that has the essence of truth but is not strictly true, or is at least less transparent. To some, this may sound like business as usual and what you need to do to win a grant. However, these little acts of truth-stretching, which can take the form of exaggerations, omissions, and misrepresentations, can exact a cost.

How It Happens: The Slippery Slope from Unknowns to Half-Truths

Grant proposals have always been on the boundary between fact and fiction because they are about selling a transformation that could occur if funding were received and a project implemented. What is proposed is usually (if not always) different from what actually gets implemented for various reasons, including incorrect assumptions during the planning phase or unpredictable events such as natural disasters or political crises during project rollout. Because proposals contain numerous unknowns and are expected to position the applicant in the most favorable light, grant writers become accustomed to treating information as building blocks to be shaped and arranged to tell the strongest story through positive framing. For example, in the paragraphs below, versions A and B tell the same basic story, but version A is the preferred telling because it frames things in a positive way and provides supporting details: 

A: “Since X year, we’ve completed four projects funded by X donor (see Box 1). Using lessons learned from the two projects that were delivered on time and on budget, and from the remaining projects that required no-cost extensions, we reviewed and updated our project management processes and procedures (see Attachment X). These updates include introducing a customized CMS platform designed to manage budget development and oversight, enabling real-time tracking and problem-solving.” 

versus:

B: “Two of our last four projects encountered challenges and required no-cost extensions. In response, we updated our project management processes and procedures to better track project results, flag problems, and solve issues.” 

The concern with factual stretching arises not from positive framing but instead with vague writing that not only lacks supporting details but also obscures facts or inflates accomplishments. Under this philosophy, any suggestion of an organization’s weaknesses or missteps must be left unsaid, leaving only stated (but undocumented) strengths. The result is language that resembles the examples above but differs in key details. For example, a more “massaged” statement might read:

C: “Our organization excels at project management and oversight. We deliver projects on time and on budget, providing exceptional value to donors, particularly given the size and complexity of the projects we implement. Supporting our effectiveness and systematic approach to project implementation are our recently updated, comprehensive project management protocols, which leverage the evidence-based, cutting-edge tools, enabling us to monitor all project activities and resolve complex issues in real-time.”

Is this final statement true, and is it reasonable, or is it perhaps misleading? 

Based on the original fact pattern presented in Example A, 50% of recent projects were delivered on time and on budget. These successful projects may have been implemented non-consecutively or implemented several years apart, potentially undermining the notion of a consistent pattern of ongoing or established project management success. Additionally, none of the statements in this final example appears to be backed up by details. While the project management protocols may be extensive, the statement doesn’t specify when they were last updated, leaving open the possibility that they were updated recently and remain untested. Example C also states that recent changes to the project management protocol allow “all” project activities to be monitored, a bold claim that may not withstand scrutiny. A major red flag for version C is that it relies on adjectives to persuade readers that the organization is a stellar performer, rather than providing data to substantiate those assertions. 

In comparison, Example A supports its statements by linking to the updated project management protocol and providing details on the four most recent projects, helping the reader better understand the organization’s experience and what informed the lessons learned. Example A is also transparent about the challenges: while it first mentions the two projects completed on time and on budget, it doesn’t attempt to conceal that two other projects did not meet those standards.

Perhaps the differences between A, B, and C seem subtle or irrelevant. If the donor wants more details, they’ll ask for it, the thinking may go. No harm done. What is worrisome is that if the donor doesn’t provide any feedback or ask for more details, it can reinforce the applicant’s belief that what was written was fine, that donors don’t expect precision, so the same vague text may be reused in the next proposal. If left uncorrected, over time, an organization’s boilerplate may be populated with language so general, or a project performance history so sanitized, that it could apply to many organizations and is essentially meaningless. In particular, generalized statements of success and accomplishments that lack source details make fact-checking difficult, if not impossible, when a donor (or an internal reviewer) asks for references.

Tolerance for generalized or inflated statements can grow. If you become accustomed to writing proposals that gloss over the facts, you may become less diligent about checking where the data comes from and if it has been properly validated. If the risks from writing inaccurate qualitative statements appear low and perhaps acceptable, the ethical concerns increase considerably when it comes to quantitative data.

When the Numbers Lie

A scenario that can be easier to see as problematic involves the manipulation of quantitative data. The most common situation we’ve seen is when, during the proposal phase, the grant writer or technical contributors cherry-pick data or make up baseline data. 

Cherry-picking data is a common practice, such as citing only studies that support the applicant's view of the most compelling description of a problem’s scale or the proposed approach. Cherry-picking isn’t a good practice, but it can go unchallenged, depending on how well the funder’s review panel knows the programmatic area and how thoroughly they check the proposal’s citations. The risk of cherry-picking is that if the data used to design a project mischaracterizes the problem, the project design could be flawed, leading to difficulties and possible failure during implementation. Organizations that have a history of failed projects will have greater difficulty securing funding.

The second scenario, in which an applicant fabricates baseline data, poses an even greater risk. We’ve seen this take two forms. In the first, the applicant seeks to establish that funding for their proposed intervention is urgently needed, given the scale of the unmet need. But what is the unmet need? Either the applicant doesn’t know how to find out, or they do know but the numbers are unimpressive, so they fabricate more favorable ones. These mistakes or overreaches can go unnoticed because, while proposals should include references for cited data, many do not require them; second, when funders do require data sources to be cited, they don’t always check them.

Variations of this problem of using weak or false data include (1) failing to conduct research for each new proposal and instead relying on research conducted several years ago, which is likely to be out of date; and (2) using current data but, either deliberately or through inattention, taking the data out of context when citing it in the proposal. 

An example of the latter occurs when someone is not careful in interpreting datasets. For example, if a government study reports that 50% of children aged 10 to 13 read below grade level in a specific geographic area, a misrepresentation would be to report that this study says 50% of children aged 10 to 13 in the entire public school system read below grade level. 

Taking data out of context is sometimes an innocent mistake, but it can be a deliberate choice on the part of the applicant in response to pressure to write the most compelling proposal possible: If the data don’t support what you want to say, you can mask this by presenting data out of context or in an ambiguous fashion.

For example, an applicant might cite an authoritative study but subtly misrepresent its findings, relying on the fact that reviewers will see the authoritative source and, if the data seem plausible, not check the references. These obfuscations can take different forms, including citing data and providing a legitimate reference, but referencing a different or outdated resource. Or, making it even harder for reviewers to verify the data, an applicant may cite a data source in the broadest terms (“A recent U.N. report…”) without providing a complete reference with a link to the cited material, instead inserting a partial reference such as “Annual Report, 2021.”

As with the earlier example, maybe this seems like business as usual, that it’s just tweaking things to make the best case. It’s not a big deal. Every case of glossed-over or misrepresented facts is not a big deal, but if adopted or accepted as common practice, it becomes one.

The Cumulative Effects of Alternative Facts

At the proposal stage, fabricated or misrepresented data could help you make your case that your project is needed, but it complicates matters if you receive an award and attempt to execute and report on the project. The baseline data you guesstimated may make your project’s efforts look less impactful than they actually were if you overestimated the size and scope of the problem. That is, your interventions—even if they were effective and competently executed—may appear to have had little impact when the project is evaluated.

The other, more insidious problem with framing things to fit the preferred narrative in proposals is that it is harder to report truthfully on things that don’t go well or that are in conflict with what you wrote in the proposal. If you state in the proposal that all project staff are experts in their field with years of experience who can hit the ground running, it becomes problematic if, in the execution of the project, you have to report that you must pay for additional staff training because the staff are actually not as qualified as you claimed. If you present yourself as a stellar, unparalleled organization of exceptional capabilities in the proposal, you have nowhere to go but down once the grant and the realities of execution of the work begin.

It’s always better to portray your organization, its capabilities, the scope of the problem, and the strengths and weaknesses of your proposed solution as honestly as possible at the proposal stage. If you do so, you will be on firmer ground to talk candidly to the donor about issues you’ve encountered during project implementation, and reporting on project progress will be easier because you began with accurate information. So, next time a senior leader says to you, “We can’t say that,” consider pushing back when the statement represents an honest (if positively framed) description of your organization’s skills, competency levels, and past challenges. If there is a fatal flaw in the grant application, that is a problem, but the solution is not to mask the flaw with false or misleading language or data; rather, it is to address the problem or not apply for the grant. If you submit a proposal without correcting these issues and your organization is subsequently found to have falsified data or misrepresented its capabilities or project needs, it may face long-term repercussions, including a compromised reputation and strained relationships with key funders.

Background research is a necessary step in the proposal process. The research produces information that can guide and support the project design while also demonstrating to the donor that the applicant understands the broader context behind the issue the project will address.

In this post, we review what is typically meant by background research. In particular, we discuss what a literature review is in the context of proposal writing and describe a process for conducting one. At the end of the post, you’ll find resources and templates you can adapt and use for your own research needs.

What Background Research Means in the Context of Proposal Writing & Why It Should Be Done

Background research conducted in preparation for writing a grant proposal is similar in many ways to a literature review conducted in an academic context as part of writing a thesis or manuscript. The research goals include learning what is known about a particular topic, such as its history (what research has been done or interventions tried, and how thinking has evolved on an issue) and its status (who is currently working on the topic or issue, and what are the open questions yet to be resolved).

One significant difference between a literature review in academia and background research conducted by a nonprofit in preparation for a grant proposal is that in academia, there is greater emphasis on finding and citing relevant peer-reviewed sources. For proposals, the background research may include peer-reviewed articles, but it will primarily rely on internal project reports and government data as its source material. Proposals written specifically to fund research are an exception, as they follow the academic standard of relying on peer-reviewed sources.

For larger, high-dollar-value proposals, the need for background research — also sometimes referred to by nonprofits as desk research or a literature review — is obvious and may, in fact, be required explicitly by the donor. For other, simpler, or lower-dollar-value proposals, while the donor may not require citations to outside data sources, some external research can still be beneficial.

How to Plan & Conduct Background Research

If you are new to background research or have been left on your own to figure out how to structure your search, consider using the process outlined below, which can be used and adapted by organizations of varying sizes and missions.

Before You Begin Your Research, Know the Questions

Conducting background research for a proposal requires first identifying the questions that need to be answered. The research needs to be focused. Otherwise, you’ll have no idea how to structure the research, such as what source material will be most relevant or what content in those materials will be most useful. Generating the right questions is important because you may not have time to revisit the sources or reinitiate the research once the proposal writing is underway.

Unlike academic literature reviews, the research for a proposal is generally not hypothesis-driven. The questions driving the background research for proposals are targeted toward some aspect of the proposal, such as learning more about the context in which the work will take place or providing ideas for (or evidence supporting) the proposed intervention. The questions should be as specific as possible, as in, “(1) What organizations conducted X-type of programs in X geographic area during the period XXXX to XXXX; (2) what were the key activities and outcomes of this work; and (3) which donors funded this work,” as opposed to “Summarize projects in X geographic area.” Another question could be on strategy, such as “Research successful models of introducing water conservation to smallholder farmers in the following region, with a focus on XYZ areas, summarizing the tools, strategies, target population, benefits/challenges of each model, and the outcomes of the interventions. The cited sources should be within the last five years.”

The questions are central to generating keywords for finding relevant source material. Not every source reviewed will speak to every question, but every source should be relevant in some way to the proposal and its subject matter. Although it isn’t always necessary to have a subject-matter expert conduct the literature review, someone with expertise will be more adept at articulating the “so what” factor — or how the literature supports or undermines the premise of the proposed project — than someone without expertise.

Content Sources: Finding Relevant Literature

For a typical grant proposal focused on project implementation, desk research consists of gathering information from multiple sources, such as:

• Recent proposals the organization has submitted, which often include information still relevant and useful for the current proposal.

• Recent project reports prepared by the organization. Project reports are particularly valuable if the proposed project is a follow-on project that is a natural progression of the activities covered in the report. Reports on projects conducted in the same geographic or programmatic area are also especially useful.

• Reports prepared by other organizations. Topical reports produced by respected national or international organizations, such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the World Health Organization, frequently appear as sources in background research. Reports from peer organizations also fall into this category, especially if the organization has led a precursor project similar to the one being proposed.

• Journal articles. As mentioned above, peer-reviewed journal articles are more relevant to certain types of proposals than others. However, as part of the research process, it is always a good idea to check whether there are any recent journal articles (e.g., those published within the last five years) relevant to the context or execution of the proposed project. One limitation of journal articles is that most nonprofits will have difficulty accessing those behind a paywall, though some articles may be available through a local public library.

• Government websites. In many countries, government websites — local, regional, and national — can be valuable sources of information, including demographic data, descriptions of agricultural services, economic benchmarks, and educational standards. A caveat with government websites is that they are often outdated. Second, information on government websites can be manipulated to fit political aims and is not always trustworthy.

• News outlets. Major newspapers are now mostly, if not entirely, published online, making it easy to incorporate news stories into background research. Like government websites, news outlets are not always objective purveyors of truth. If you choose to include news articles, either stick to respected national or international media outlets or proceed with citing news articles from lesser-known sources, but disclose any known bias or limitations in the reporting.

• Miscellaneous websites. Websites of varying degrees of reliability and authority can appear in search results when using a traditional search engine or an AI tool like ChatGPT. These might include the websites of professional associations, nonprofit organizations, or private foundations, which are generally reliable, as well as those of partisan organizations or public figures with extensive followings but limited qualifications and low trustworthiness. As a general rule, it is best to stick to recognized, widely trusted sources. Lesser-known websites can be relevant (e.g., a journalist’s blog). However, if you cite sources that may not be widely known, it is crucial to include a complete citation to the source, which will help reviewers locate the material; if there is space in the proposal, it can also be helpful to provide context about the website’s history and content.

• Books. Books are less commonly included in proposal background research, though, depending on the type of funding being sought, the funder, and the subject matter, one or more books may be appropriate. A reason not to cite a book is that it may not be accessible online, which can be an obstacle for easily documenting content or, for the proposal reviewer, accessing the book’s content to verify a citation.

Organizing Your Research

Background research can be organized in different ways. The appropriate format or approach depends on the type of research and the preferences of both the team and the researcher. A few options include:

• A spreadsheet. The spreadsheet model is the most common format for academic literature reviews and can also work well for background research in proposals. The advantage of a spreadsheet is that it is easy to scan. The challenge with using spreadsheets is that they can encourage overly brief responses, which may fail to provide the proposal writer with enough information. Additionally, in our experience, there’s a tendency to leave most of the cells blank. Leaving the occasional cell blank is fine — not every column will be relevant for every source — but if too much of the spreadsheet is left blank, the literature review will offer limited value.

→ For reference, two spreadsheet templates are provided below, which you can download and tailor to your needs by deleting or renaming columns. In the spreadsheets, we’ve tagged several column headings with comments to explain what type of information belongs in the column.

• A wiki tool. Another option, used less commonly but useful in some circumstances, is a wiki tool like Notion, Slab, or Microsoft Loop, which can be used to create a shared knowledge base. The benefits of wikis are that (1) you can use them to share information in a document format or as a spreadsheet, and (2) information added to a wiki is easy to share and co-edit, allowing it to be continually updated for new opportunities. As an example, we’ve created a Notion version of a literature review template (click the image below to view and duplicate the template into your Notion account). One negative of a wiki is that, while it is easy to share a literature review as a page or series of interconnected pages, it is not always as easy to download the content and share it as an editable file. However, both Notion and Loop offer this functionality. With Notion, you can export your spreadsheet as a CSV. Loop integrates with other Microsoft tools, allowing any Loop table to be exported to Excel.

• Document format. You can also organize your research as a Word file or a Google Doc. If you decide to go this route, it is important to develop a template to ensure that you capture similar types and amounts of information about each source. If you have a template formatted correctly with different style settings for each heading level, you can automatically generate a table of contents, making the document easier to navigate. One note of caution about using a document format is that it can be tempting to fall into a “book report” mode of stating what a source document is about instead of analyzing the content and focusing the summary on how (and how well) the content in the literature relates to the subject matter of your proposal.

On the other hand, one advantage of a document format, and why some people prefer it over a spreadsheet, is that having key findings from desk research already written up in long form (versus the typically truncated form found in spreadsheets) can facilitate the proposal writing process. This is because some of the summary information and analysis from the literature review may be written in a way that can be imported into the proposal as-is or with relatively minor edits.

→ For an example of a document-based template for background research, we’ve created an example in Google Docs that you can view, download, and customize to fit your needs. You can find the template in the list of downloads below.

A Less Common Step for Proposals: Writing a Formal Literature Review

In an academic setting, the information captured in your notes (i.e., the document file or spreadsheet format described earlier) would be used to write a document that organizes the literature according to a particular structure, which could be chronologically, thematically, or by methodology or publication. The goal of the document is to synthesize the information and draw conclusions about what the literature as a whole is saying relative to the chosen topic.

A basic structure for a typical literature review is: introduction (what the topic is and its relevance), the body (critical analysis of each source and how it relates to your topic), and conclusion (summary of key findings, areas of agreement or disagreement in the literature, and identified gaps for further research).

For proposal writing, although the term “literature review” is sometimes used to refer to background or desk research in preparation for writing a proposal, this step of actually writing a literature review is almost never done. When someone at a nonprofit requests that someone complete a literature review, they are almost always referring only to the initial work of conducting background research and preparing notes in the form of a spreadsheet or Word document. They rarely expect a literature review in the sense of a formal write-up. One important exception is research proposals.

For research proposals, a literature review section is typically a required section within the proposal. However, it is an abbreviated version constrained by page limits and usually does not follow the formal outline provided above, which includes an introduction and conclusion. Instead, it might be a page of dense text, listing several highly relevant peer-reviewed journal articles and highlighting their key points, contributions to the field, and their gaps. Pointing out the gaps in the literature is essential in research proposals because the proposed research must be positioned as filling a knowledge gap left unaddressed by prior research.

→ For a basic literature review template, you can view, download, and edit the one we’ve created in Google Docs by clicking on the image below.

Additional Tips for Conducting Background Research

• As part of defining the scope of the review, there should be limits on the age of the material being reviewed. For example, it is common for literature reviews to only include materials published within the last five years.

• Regarding the chosen format for organizing the research — narrative document, spreadsheet, or wiki — it is crucial to list the complete citation for the source. Ideally, the reference should be formatted in the style used by the organization or required by the donor (e.g., American Psychological Association) because formatting citations after they’ve been inserted into the proposal can be a significant burden to the proposal writer or editor.

• To make it easier for the rest of the proposal team to find and verify information in the cited materials, include relevant page numbers.

• Journal articles, reports, and other documents (unless confidential) included in the background research should be uploaded into a shared folder or a reference manager, such as Mendeley, so that the entire proposal team can refer to them if necessary. For more information on Mendeley, see our post on using reference managers.

Summary

Background research, also known as desk research or literature review, is an essential preliminary step in preparing proposals. The research should start by defining the questions that need to be answered, such as learning about the context in which the proposed project will take place, or whether there is any evidence to support the proposed project design. The questions focus the research by helping to identify keywords, which point the way regarding where to look for relevant resources, such as reports, proposals, journal articles, and trusted news sources.

Literature reviews are more than simply copying and pasting information from the source material. As you review articles, reports, websites, and other materials, you should actively engage with the material so that you can spot answers to the questions you’ve generate in the first step in the process: In completing the literature review, you are filling your knowledge gaps so that you can accurately write about the context of the project and looking for gaps in knowledge so that you can position your project to address them.

Conducting background research can be a time-consuming process. If you know you’ll be working on a proposal on a particular topic in the near future, it’s a good idea to go ahead and start the research process by creating a preliminary list of keywords, identifying and gathering what you believe will be relevant internal documents, and searching for relevant external literature. After the solicitation is released, you can then revisit the literature review research summary and determine if it needs to be updated.

Downloads

Click on each image to open and download the file.

Basic Literature Review Research Template (Spreadsheet)

Proposal-Focused Literature Review Research Template (Spreadsheet)

Document Version of Lit Review Research Notes

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]]>Peak ProposalsWed, 13 Aug 2025 21:00:08 +0000https://www.peakproposals.com/blog/practice-for-better-grant-proposals64e4f94e694e7e44f8f4bcf2:64e5063ba3683b52e31ec332:689cb8ba31f6df768ee58bd2August 13, 2025

Nonprofit organizations often struggle to develop a sustainable strategy for pursuing grant funding. While most organizations would like to have a dedicated team to handle all grant research and writing tasks, it’s not always realistic due to cost constraints. Similarly, it’s not feasible for many organizations to pay for grant writing consultants due to cost concerns: Grant consultants must be paid when the work is done, regardless of whether a grant is ultimately funded.

Another consideration that prevents organizations from hiring dedicated grant writers is that grant work tends to be uneven and variable in workload. Most nonprofits are funded by a relatively small number of funders, and these funders’ grant cycles dictate the organization’s grant-writing cycles. For organizations dependent on funding from the U.S. government, busy periods are frequently from early March to mid-June and, as the end of the fiscal year approaches, from mid-August to the end of September. For organizations reliant on private foundations for funding, busy periods may differ somewhat, but they will typically involve increased activity in the fall and spring (e.g., February to May and August to October). Due to the cyclical nature of the workload, it can be challenging to justify a full-time grant writer position, especially for smaller organizations.

If hiring grant writers is not an option, or if it’s impossible to cover peak grant writing periods with the grant writers who may be on staff, most organizations ask program staff — and sometimes administrative or executive-level staff — to assume grant writing duties. While this can work, the individuals tasked with writing grants may be inexperienced or have weak writing skills. In response to this skill deficit, organizations often host webinars or training series on grant writing.

Training Pros and Cons

A training session is a good idea, especially for providing instruction on the grant-writing process. However, based on our experience working in organizations of various sizes, these one-off webinars or training series on grant writing typically do not lead to demonstrable improvement in staff members’ ability to write effectively, although they may increase their familiarity with grant development processes.

Why is this, and what’s an alternative strategy for improving writing skills if training isn’t the answer?

Not always, but often, the idea to provide training on grant writing comes from a combination of need (“we need more people who know how to write high-quality grant proposals”), desire (“we want to improve the quality of grant writing at our organization), and urgency (“we are in a funding crisis, so we must increase our grant writing success immediately”).

The underlying premise is that by providing writing-focused training, staff will become better writers, resulting in better-written grant proposals, which, in turn, will lead to an increase in awarded grants. Unfortunately, this premise places too much faith in the power of a few training sessions and overlooks that, in the absence of other measures, writing training alone is unlikely to have a transformative effect.

This is not to say that training staff in grant writing skills doesn’t have value; training does have a role. We offer a course on grant writing ourselves, which focuses on the mechanics of preparing a grant proposal, including how to approach standard sections and apply specific strategies to address common proposal challenges. Topics like proposal strategy and proposal management are easier to package into a short training program because it’s possible to teach participants tangible, practical tips they can immediately apply, such as how to gather relevant information and organize it to meet the funder’s requirements.

However, training on proposal strategy and management is most effective when participants already have solid writing skills as a foundation and seek guidance on applying them in the specific context of proposals.

Although they can be very useful, these practical grant-writing courses will not turn non-writers into writers, or good writers into great ones. For that, there’s no quick fix.

Writing Anything Well (Including Grant Proposals) Requires a Commitment to Reading and Writing Regularly

Improving writing skills requires two things: (1) a steady diet of reading, and (2) frequent writing. These points are well established, but in-house grant-writing training often overlooks the importance and complementary power of reading and may assume that training on the qualities of good writing is enough to “up-skill” staff. But writing is only one piece of the equation. By reading regularly, you are exposed to new words and to complex, varied methods for communicating thoughts. If you read across genres, you will see how writing can vary in voice, tone, and style depending on the context. Reading also helps train the eye to identify incorrect spelling, a benefit that shows up in the “that word doesn’t look right to me” moments we’ve all experienced. Reading widely can also expose readers to various methods for presenting points and logically supporting them, which proposal writers regularly do.

While a reading habit is important, opportunities to write regularly are clearly essential. In addition to attending a training session in grant writing, if you want to become a better writer, you need to practice your writing skills. Writing practice provides an opportunity to apply grammar and syntax rules and to test approaches to organizing your thoughts around particular topics. Writing also reinforces the vocabulary learned through reading.

For individuals seeking to improve their proposal-writing skills, an additional layer is gaining experience with proposals. Finding opportunities to practice proposal writing can be challenging for new writers, as organizations prefer proposals written by experienced writers.

Fortunately, it’s possible to address all these competing needs: With planning, an organization can assign less-experienced writers to write proposals and still produce proposals that meet or surpass an acceptable level of quality.

Organizations Can Improve the Quality of Their Grants Without Relying on Grant Writing Training

Because improving writing skills takes time and involves habits that an organization cannot control, such as reading, if an organization needs stronger writers immediately due to anticipated proposal needs, it will be challenging. Under these circumstances, an organization may have to accept “good-enough” proposals while it cultivates staff writing skills or seeks other solutions.

New proposal writers or less experienced writers often produce proposal language that lacks polish or clarity. It’s rarely completely unintelligible; it just takes more effort on the part of the reader to understand the major points. For proposals, the effort piece is an issue if the target reader is a funder who may decide the proposal is not worth their time.

Solutions for improving grant writing in situations like this, where staff with decent (but not strong) writing skills need to be relied upon, are to:

- Use a good editor. Having someone complete a thorough edit of the text can make a significant difference in the readability of a proposal, so of all the suggestions, it’s the one not to skip. If possible, a trained editor is ideal; however, a staff member with a good eye can also be effective.

- Apply a team writing approach. A second strategy is to assign multiple people to co-write each proposal, rather than having a single “lead writer” for the bulk of the writing, plus possibly a few support writers working on one or two of the shorter or supplementary sections. This approach avoids relying on a single person to handle all major writing and ensures the proposal’s quality does not hinge on a single person’s skills. The most skilled writers should be assigned the key sections (e.g., those weighted most heavily in the funder’s scoring criteria), while the writers with less-developed writing skills should be assigned to the lower-value sections. This strategy can require more planning on the proposal management side due to the number of writers to recruit and track, but it can be one of the easiest ways to provide multiple staff members with proposal writing experience without placing a significant burden on novice writers or risking the submission of a substandard proposal.

- Review proposal sections early and often. Another strategy to consider is using a review process that incorporates multiple brief reviews at the section level, rather than waiting to review until the writer(s) have a complete draft. Every part of a proposal must work together, using the same terminology and narrative voice to describe the same activities. These considerations are why proposal review stages are traditionally designed to review iterations of a complete draft (i.e., first draft, second draft, final draft) rather than individual sections. However, structuring reviews around individual sections — where each part is checked before being assembled into a full draft — enables a faster feedback loop and earlier identification of issues.

Frequent reviews of smaller sections of text also make it easier to mentor new or less experienced writers. To make the feedback more manageable, one or two subject-matter experts can perform targeted reviews of a particular section. For example, one person with project management experience could work with the writer(s) on the activity descriptions, while a senior monitoring and evaluation specialist could work one-on-one with the person assigned to write the performance monitoring plan.

Eventually, the full draft should be reviewed by a panel of people as part of finalizing the proposal. However, if the system works as intended, every component of the proposal will have been thoroughly vetted at the section level, ensuring it has no major substantive issues.

- Follow a formula. When a funder posts a solicitation, it is seeking specific information on the “who, what, when, where, why, and how” behind the proposed scope of work. When reading a proposal, the funder’s reviewers are first and foremost looking for answers to the requests for information outlined in the solicitation. They want to see if the applicant understands the purpose of the grant funding and can present a convincing case that it has the capacity to do the work. A proposal consisting of average writing may still be good enough to win, as long as it responds to the solicitation in a way that is generally clear and avoids glaring grammar and spelling issues, which can be major distractions. The “good enough to win” approach may be perceived as a compromise in terms of quality. We view it as a realistic approach. It asks, “What do we need to do to win?” rather than “What do we need to do to produce the best proposal?”, which is a different question.

To adopt a “good enough” approach that enables less-skilled writers to work on proposals, it’s helpful to have a formula they can apply to their assigned sections. This formula should outline what points to cover in what order, as in: “Start with an opening paragraph that introduces the project, the lead organization, and its partners….The final sentence will summarize the project’s goal. In the second paragraph….” The formula will need to be adjusted slightly for each funder and opportunity, but it can give writers an idea of what to communicate to prepare a responsive proposal that provides the key information funders seek.

- Leverage AI. Lastly, writers can ask AI tools to evaluate a piece of writing and indicate where and how it can be strengthened, a step that can be helpful to both novice and experienced writers. One caution is that the AI tool should have security measures in place to prevent confidential information from being exposed. One secure option is the enterprise version of Microsoft Copilot, which can be used in Microsoft Word and includes data-protection features.

Summary

Many organizations cannot afford dedicated grant writers. As a result, they recruit program and other staff members to write proposals. Some of these recruits may be solid writers but lack experience in proposal writing, while others may be inexperienced in proposal writing and lack strong writing skills. To address the skills gap, organizations often default to providing grant-writing training as either a onetime session or a series of sessions. The hope is that the training will enhance staff writing skills, leading to higher-quality proposals and, ultimately, more awards.

The difficulty is that writing skills are developed over time. Improving one’s writing not only takes a commitment to writing regularly but also to reading, as exposure to high-quality writing gives readers ideas of how to structure their thoughts in a logical and clear way. Since organizations cannot control the reading, they focus on the writing. Training on writing can help, but only if the organization moves beyond occasional training sessions to offer opportunities for novice or less-skilled writers to gain practical experience writing proposals.

Ways to do this, which balance providing the writers with experience without overly burdening them or putting proposal quality at risk, include employing editors to polish proposals; applying a team-writing approach, where the writing responsibilities are distributed across several writers; using a review process that incorporates multiple reviews at the individual section level before assembling the proposal for a full-draft review; providing a writing formula or recipe that writers can follow to prepare a “good enough proposal” that contains all the key information the funder expects; and leveraging AI tools like Microsoft Copilot to evaluate writing quality and suggest improvements.

July 1, 2025, marked the closure of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) after more than 60 years of operations. What remains of the former USAID programming has been folded into the U.S. State Department.

For those who have worked for USAID or on USAID-funded projects, it has been a challenging period. Organizations that have relied on USAID funding have had their operations disrupted, laid off large numbers of staff, or, in some cases, shut down completely. More concerning, vulnerable populations around the world that depended on USAID-funded projects are now left without essential supplies and services.

The speed of USAID’s dismantling, which began shortly after Donald J. Trump's inauguration as the 47th president of the United States, caught most people by surprise. Following the initial shock, people began to wonder how USAID could be dismantled so swiftly and with such limited public outcry.

If you work for an organization outside of the U.S., or if you are based in the U.S. but rely on grants from private foundations and not federal sources, the closure of USAID might seem like an unfortunate event, but one unrelated to your grantseeking. Although USAID’s dismantling may not directly affect your organization or sector, some lessons from its shuttering are relevant to all grantseekers. In this post, we cover four lessons that we believe are universally applicable.

Lessons from the Closure of USAID

1. Good Work Does Not Speak for Itself

As the majority of USAID programs were frozen and ultimately canceled earlier this year, those in the USAID sphere quickly realized that the general public was unaware of what USAID did or what it meant to work for a USAID implementing organization. This lack of knowledge created an opening for USAID to be more easily framed by its opponents as the epitome of fraud, waste, and abuse, making it an easier target to demolish. The lesson from USAID’s downfall is that messaging matters. The public needs to know what you are doing, why you are doing it, how you do it, the results you are achieving, and why those results matter (to the world and to them) before your organization or sector comes under attack and your funding is at risk. When it was clear USAID was being targeted, there wasn’t a groundswell of support that there might have been had more of the public understood what USAID did and how its work benefited people globally and in the U.S.

🎯 Every organization must maintain a website that is up to date, easy to navigate, and clearly communicates why the organization exists, what the organization does, and what it has accomplished.

There are several free and low-cost options available for creating a website. If you do not have a website yet, we’ve listed a few resources below that may help. Having an active presence on social media is probably also necessary, though it's now more fragmented, with numerous outlets, so it can take some trial and error to find the best ones to reach your desired audience.

Resources:

• Create and Launch! How to Create a Website Using a Free Website Builder

• Improve Your Chances of Getting Grant Funding: Create a Communications Strategy

• Website Building: Free & Inexpensive Tools

2. Talking to Your Core Supporters Is Not Enough

Over the years, USAID staff have worked closely with members of Congress, educating them about USAID’s work and hosting them on country visits, allowing them to see projects firsthand. Dedicating resources to educate members of Congress made sense because Congress approved USAID’s funding. However, perhaps what was not given enough focus was the need to educate U.S. taxpayers about USAID’s mission and achievements. Organizations are more stable when they have both core and broad support. While core supporters in Congress may have enabled USAID’s funding in the past, public understanding and support for the organization might have helped it weather the current period of political upheaval. In the U.S., there has long been a false belief that foreign aid spending accounted for a huge share of the federal budget. This misunderstanding led many Americans to believe that their communities’ needs were going unmet because too much money was being funneled into foreign assistance. In reality, USAID’s budget represented approximately 1% of the federal budget. Supporters of foreign aid found this mischaracterization frustrating. In retrospect, the false beliefs about foreign assistance should have been countered more vigorously.

🎯 A lesson from USAID’s dismantling is that it is not enough to communicate regularly with your current supporters, including individual donors, government representatives, foundation staff, or elected officials. USAID maintained a comprehensive website, published a variety of downloadable publications, and regularly posted updates on multiple social media accounts. It appeared to be covering all the bases. All that activity wasn’t enough, perhaps in large part because we see similar things online to what we’ve previously searched for or liked. Most Americans probably rarely or never saw stories about USAID, its programs, and how these programs benefited the U.S. Maybe USAID staff did not think an expansive public informational campaign was needed, or maybe it lacked the resources to implement one. Presumably, a public campaign seemed unnecessary, given the impression that there was widespread support in Congress for USAID. It’s a “what if” thought experiment, but possibly reaching out to people across the U.S. through diverse messaging campaigns could have changed public opinion about the value of USAID.

3. Many Programs Will Require Ongoing Support

Another vulnerability for USAID, which community organizations can also face, is that the types of initiatives USAID funded were not “one and done” interventions, with the possible exception of supplying emergency supplies during a natural disaster or humanitarian crisis. Even in the case of a natural disaster, assistance may be needed for years after the event to help a community fully recover.

Some skeptics of USAID and foreign assistance argue that the ongoing need for aid to developing countries suggests that foreign assistance is ineffective. If the aid system really worked, they reasoned, recipients of foreign aid would have graduated from the aid-based system by now. However, countries receiving foreign aid face significant challenges, and it is unrealistic to expect them — especially without a planned and thoughtful phase-out of aid — to go it alone.

USAID and the implementers of its projects typically emphasized successes because success is a way of saying “this investment is worth it” and “we’re good at what we do.” It’s certainly important to measure a project’s impact and to celebrate achievements. The downside of emphasizing success and constant forward motion is that for big issues like those USAID worked on, change can be incremental. It may be necessary to fund similar projects over several decades to mitigate the worst effects of a given problem while gradually working toward a longer-term, more satisfactory solution. The aid sector’s understandable emphasis on progress and accomplishments may have created unrealistic expectations among donors regarding the need for ongoing support.

🎯 Regardless of your organization’s mission, if you rely on outside funding (grant funding or charitable donations), you have probably felt pressure to spin things as positively as possible, with the idea that showcasing successes leads to more financial support and that it’s bad policy to admit that things aren’t going well or will require continual investment. Emphasizing project achievements is a standard practice. However, the narrative of accomplishments must align with the facts of what has actually been accomplished, or your supporters may wonder why your organization still needs funding to conduct similar projects for the same beneficiaries.

One solution to this dilemma is to structure your narrative around what has changed, rather than framing it in terms of what has been accomplished. Words like “accomplished” or “accomplishments” are loaded. They have a tone of finality about them (i.e., “mission accomplished”) that may not be a correct depiction of your organization’s projects. Your reports and communications are opportunities to share news about the actions taken and changes that have occurred, creating an opening to discuss the very real, smaller shifts that can lead to bigger results over time. The word “change” is also associated with motion, which allows for the telling of a fuller, ongoing, and more nuanced story of the full spectrum of your work: what your project has accomplished, what it hopes to achieve, and why continued support is necessary.

4. All Donor Funding Carries Risk

Through USAID, the U.S. government (USG) funded more international aid projects than any other country in the world. Because of the perceived reliability of USG funding and the diversity of programs it supported, many organizations became overly dependent on funding from this single source. Everyone — including USAID staff who watched the programs they selected for funding being terminated — has learned that USG funding cannot be relied upon.

Would it have been a better policy if USAID had required all projects it funded to have multiple income streams (e.g., cost share) to avoid this dependency? Maybe. Cost share is difficult for organizations to come up with and manage, so it would have been unpopular. However, such a policy could have prevented organizations from becoming so reliant on a single funding source and basing their business model on it. And although it might not have saved all USAID-supported projects, requiring every project to have more than one funding source could have prevented some projects from closing down when USAID funding was frozen and subsequently cancelled. Of course, the counterargument is that mandatory co-funding on such a large scale would have been unwieldy to implement, and that USAID typically did not require cost-sharing because important initiatives would never have happened unless USAID funded them fully. Whether different funding policies on USAID’s part could have helped preserve some of its investments, we’ll never know. What we have learned in 2025 is that countries, organizations, and communities are vulnerable if they become overly reliant on a single donor, even if that donor has been a dependable partner since 1961, as in the case of USAID.

🎯 If your organization receives a significant amount of money from a single funding source —such that if that donor stopped funding you, your organization might not be able to survive — you must reevaluate how you operate.

Many USAID-funded organizations would scale up their operations when they received a new award and did not (as they do now) try to economize when it came to budgeting with unrestricted funding, which pays for administrative and executive staff salaries, among other non-project-related expenses. Partly, organizations expanded because it was inconceivable that USAID would cease to exist or that funding would be cut. What the shuttering of USAID and the cancellation of other USG programs have taught us is that no external funding source is a 100% certainty, especially in today’s political climate.

To prepare for a potential loss of donor funds, your organization may want to start reducing its costs now by taking actions such as hiring fewer staff, using existing staff more efficiently, leveraging surge support instead of hiring permanent staff, and (if feasible) opting to operate entirely virtually rather than maintaining a physical headquarters. Implementing one or more of these measures, along with others, could help your organization reduce its operational costs and better position itself to survive the loss of a major donor. It is standard advice to diversify funding. Diversifying funding can be challenging to implement, so don’t wait for a financial crisis to hit before exploring new funding streams or seeking ways to increase efficiency.

What Does the Future of Grant Funding Look Like?

Based on current trends, we predict that funding opportunities will be more limited and that competition for them will be more intense. These trends were already visible before the turmoil in the U.S., and they have accelerated under the Trump administration. The loss of USG funding (for both domestic and international programs) cannot be replaced by other funding sources, at least not fully. Many nonprofit organizations may not survive the loss of USG funding and will permanently close their doors, and those that do survive may end up significantly smaller than they were in December 2024. These changes will not just impact service delivery and research initiatives. It will also significantly impact careers, potentially leaving fewer people able to start or maintain careers in organizations focused on humanitarian initiatives. The one potential upside to all this turmoil is that it may lead to innovations and efficiencies that were not discovered or employed earlier because there wasn’t the downward pressure to do so. But that one positive is overshadowed by the millions of people who will go without life-saving food and medicine, and the tens of thousands of people who have lost their jobs because of recent USG actions to cut assistance.

Grant funding will not disappear entirely, but it will be different, and there will be less of it.

While we can’t solve the bigger issues or change the trends we see, we can offer some tools to help you be more competitive in your grantseeking. If you haven’t already, we invite you to explore our blog and free, affordable courses for tips on grantseeking and writing.

Further reading

- Opinion: I Worked at U.S.A.I.D. for Over 8 Years. This Is Our Biggest Failure (Note: This is a NY Times article, which may require a subscription to access.)

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]]>Peak ProposalsFri, 13 Dec 2024 21:44:21 +0000https://www.peakproposals.com/blog/getting-past-writing-blocks64e4f94e694e7e44f8f4bcf2:64e5063ba3683b52e31ec332:675c966448aa5748e0e4bce2Blog RSS

December 13, 2024

Proposals come together in fits and starts, and sometimes the writing just does not flow. How do you get unstuck when this happens so that you can meet the submission deadline? Below are six suggestions for getting past writing blocks.

1. Go back to the solicitation. If you are struggling to write a grant proposal, the solicitation should be your first destination. The solicitation is not just where you learn how to apply. It is also where you can gain insight into the funder and the problem they are trying to solve. For example, many solicitations released by government agencies include a comprehensive treatment of the context of the proposed work they wish to fund. Reviewing the solicitation again and confirming the proposal guidelines can also spark ideas for how to respond to specific sections.

   Solicitations from small foundations may not contain much background information. When this happens, the next strategy on our list may serve you better.

2. Do outside reading. By “outside reading,” we mean conducting desk research on sources beyond the solicitation and internal documents, such as past proposals and reports. If your project is tackling a societal problem, read articles from respected journals on the latest thinking about it. You may also find it helpful to look at the funder’s and competitors’ websites to see how they discuss the particular issue and their work to address it. Grants, projects, and programs always build on prior work, and external research can help you identify what has come before and how your project can capitalize on or augment it.

   Funders reward applicants who demonstrate an understanding of the context in which the proposed work will take place, including awareness of the major stakeholders. At a minimum, familiarizing yourself with this background information can help you write the proposal’s background and context section and other sections, including descriptions of the proposed interventions.

3. Try mind mapping. If you’ve re-read the solicitation and conducted desk research, and still feel unsure how to proceed, another step you can take is to try mind-mapping. Mind mapping can be done digitally through a whiteboard app or the old-school way with a flip chart and markers. For some people, mind mapping checks several boxes. It can be used for brain dumping (putting down current thoughts), brainstorming (generating new ideas and associations), and strategizing (seeing relationships between different threads of thought and using these connections for project planning). Mind mapping can be used at the individual or group level, making it useful across different stages of the proposal process.

4. Make it simpler. If you have reached an impasse in your writing, you may be making things too complex. Either your writing needs to be simplified, or your project ideas may need to be pared down. When you are trying to write a sentence, paragraph, or section and the writing is not coming together, you may have added too many moving parts.

   To get past the writing block, it can be helpful to shorten your sentences so each sentence is about a single topic. From working on proposals for many years, we’ve noticed that many writers use sentences that read like lists, such as “The proposed project is innovative, comprehensive, and cost-effective.” To simplify and strengthen your case, rewrite your sentences to add detail. You want to show, not tell, the reviewers about your project’s strengths. When you add details, the next sentence usually presents itself because additional details come to mind. In contrast, listing a bunch of adjectives can often feel like a dead end. In our example sentence, you could split the sentence into several parts: You could have a sentence about what makes the project innovative, you could follow this with a sentence showing how comprehensive the project is by naming its specific components, and you could end with a sentence explaining what makes your project cost-effective.

   By breaking up your points into separate sentences or paragraphs, you give each topic its due while reducing the risk of losing the reader.

5. Get an outside perspective. If you have tried the four techniques above and are still having difficulty, it may be time to seek an outside perspective. Proposal teams often huddle together when they reach an impasse. They do this because they believe they know the solicitation and the proposed project better than anyone else and are, therefore, in the best position to determine a way forward. In some respects, this is true. If a team turns to someone outside the team for advice and that person has not read the solicitation and is unfamiliar with the team’s thinking, there’s a risk the advice will be irrelevant or non-compliant with the proposal’s guidelines. On the other hand, if the team can find someone who knows the subject matter and the donor — and is willing to take the time to read the solicitation and the proposal draft thoroughly — consulting someone outside the proposal process can be extremely valuable.

   Because the team members have spent weeks on the proposal, they are invested in what they’ve written. This creates blind spots and makes it harder for them to identify the proposal’s weakest areas. Someone from outside the team can look at the proposal more critically. Whereas the proposal team might look at a proposal and ask, “How can we make our ideas work?”, an outsider can say, “This doesn’t look like a strong strategy for the following reasons—have you considered this other path?”

If your proposal is not coming together or your writing is not flowing, a final tip is to take a break. If a day-long break is not possible, even stepping away for a few hours can help you return to the process with a little more objectivity.

Writing a grant proposal is deadline-driven work. For this reason, it can be difficult for proposal team members to stop working on the proposal for more than a day or two. The strategies above are helpful in this regard because they allow team members to gain perspective on the proposal while continuing to contribute to the proposal effort.

April 28, 2024

Can you use artificial intelligence (AI) to write your next grant proposal? New companies like Grantable and Grant Assistant believe the answer is yes. But can you truly step away from the process and rely on an AI tool to do all the work? Probably not—at least not yet. However, AI tools can reduce the work associated with writing a proposal.

The Process

While AI tools may not be able to write an entire proposal, they can help develop proposal sections. AI tools for proposal writing build responses based on content the applicant uploads, including copies of the solicitation, reports, staff biographies, and boilerplate text. Based on the tool’s understanding of the solicitation's requirements in each section, it uses the uploaded material and answers to prompts to craft a response. After the software prepares a draft, the user must review the generated content to confirm its accuracy and refine the response.

The AI tools on the market today are more summative than creative. They can mine uploaded content for relevant information, but cannot, for example, design a project or prepare a monitoring and evaluation plan. The user-applicant is still a crucial part of the process because, without the user feeding the AI tool information and shaping the content, the tool’s output will not be specific or correct.

The companies behind AI proposal-writing software state that their tools will not generate an identical response to the same solicitation for multiple users. If applicants A and B subscribe to the same software and use the tool to prepare proposals for the same funding opportunity, the proposals will not be identical because the AI tool creates its response based on organization-specific information uploaded by the user.

While capabilities will be different, it seems possible that if two organizations use the same AI tool to apply to the same opportunity, some AI-generated text might be similar across the proposals for sections that focus on universal rather than organization-specific information. One example that comes to mind is the proposal’s background section. The background section typically covers the history of the problem or situation the funding opportunity seeks to address. If the AI tool uses information pulled from the internet (rather than user-uploaded content) to draft this section, it seems reasonable that similar-sounding language might appear in multiple proposals developed through the same tool. AI software companies downplay the risk of duplicate responses by saying the user should customize the language generated by their tools. In practice, some users may not have the time or interest to review and revise the AI-generated text.

The Starting Place

New AI software tools seem to come out every day. You have several options if you want to start using AI for your proposals. However, most AI tools marketed specifically for grant or proposal writing have limited free plans, if they have them at all. Instead of purchasing a proposal-specific AI application, one option is to use a more general AI tool like Google Gemini (previously called Bard) or Microsoft Copilot to start testing the AI waters. Both tools offer free and premium plans.

Google Gemini

The free version of Gemini produces responses very quickly. The responses are short and to the point. For example, in response to the question “How can grant writers use Gemini to write proposals?” Gemini responded:

Grant writers can leverage Gemini's strengths throughout the grant proposal process, from research to final edits. Here's how:

Research and Planning:

Understanding Funder Priorities: Struggling to grasp a funder's focus? Copy and paste their website's mission statement or relevant news articles into a Google Doc. Use Gemini's "Help me Write" feature with a prompt like "You are applying for a grant from [funder name]. Draft a targeted grant proposal... Include goals of our project, KPIs, and budget requests." Gemini can extract the funder's priorities from the provided text and use that to craft a proposal outline aligned with their interests.

Drafting the Proposal:

Targeted Content: Once you have a grasp of the funder's priorities, you can use Gemini again to draft specific sections. For instance, prompt Gemini with "Write a compelling Needs Statement for a grant proposal on [your cause area]" This can jumpstart your writing and ensure the Needs Statement resonates with the funder's goals.

Editing and Polishing:

Clarity and Concision: Gemini excels at revising and editing text for clarity and conciseness. Draft your proposal sections and then use Gemini's "Help me Write" feature with prompts like "Improve the clarity of this paragraph" or "Rewrite this sentence to be more concise" to ensure your message shines through.

Overall Benefits:

Efficiency: Using Gemini can save grant writers significant time by streamlining research, drafting specific sections, and revising for clarity. This allows them to focus on the proposal's strategic direction and impactful storytelling.

Focus: Gemini helps grant writers stay focused on the funder's priorities by highlighting relevant information and crafting content that directly addresses their interests.

Remember:

While Gemini is a valuable tool, it shouldn't replace your expertise. Use its output as a starting point and always edit and tailor it to your specific project and grantmaker.

The response above was produced through Gemini’s free plan. Gemini’s premium plan, Gemini Advanced, should produce even more nuanced responses. Here’s what Gemini has to say when about the differences between the free Gemini plan and Gemini Advanced, which costs $19.99/month.

The key differences between the free Gemini plan and Gemini Advanced boil down to two main points:

Model Capability:

Free Gemini: Uses a capable large language model, likely Gemini 1.0 Pro.

Gemini Advanced: Utilizes Google's most powerful AI model, Gemini 1.0 Ultra. This translates to superior reasoning, problem-solving, and handling complex tasks, especially in coding.

Features:

Free Gemini: Handles various tasks like creative writing, information retrieval, and basic conversation.

Gemini Advanced: Offers all the above plus in-depth creative text formatting, advanced code assistance (including debugging and code manipulation), and a deeper understanding of your conversational flow.

Here's a quick comparison table:

Additionally, Gemini Advanced comes bundled with a Google One AI Premium Plan subscription, which offers:

2TB of cloud storage across Google Drive, Gmail, and Photos.

Premium Google Support for all Google products.

Is Gemini Advanced worth it?

It depends on your needs. If you just need basic interactions and tasks, the free Gemini plan is sufficient. However, if you require in-depth assistance with creative writing, complex coding, or want to have longer and more nuanced conversations, then Gemini Advanced might be worth considering, especially with the initial free trial.

Microsoft Copilot

The other AI tool that we suggest exploring is Microsoft Copilot. As with Google’s Gemini, in summarizing the features of Copilot, we turned to Copilot itself for information.

Microsoft Copilot’s free version will meet the needs of users who do not plan to use Copilot regularly. If you want faster performance, more nuanced responses, and the ability to save chat histories, Copilot Pro—a $20/month add-on to Microsoft 365 personal or family accounts—would be the better choice. To learn more about Copilot Pro’s enhanced features, we asked Copilot to describe the pro version’s enhanced performance features.

When we refer to enhanced performance in the context of Microsoft Copilot Pro, we are highlighting several key aspects that set it apart from the free version:

Faster Response Times:

* Copilot Pro is optimized for quicker responses. It processes your queries and requests more efficiently, reducing the time you need to wait for a helpful answer.

* This enhanced speed can be especially beneficial when you’re working on time-sensitive tasks or need immediate assistance.

Improved Accuracy and Precision:

* Copilot Pro’s AI algorithms have been fine-tuned to provide more accurate and precise information.

* It understands context better, leading to more relevant and context-aware responses.

* Whether you’re writing code, drafting an email, or seeking information, Copilot Pro aims to deliver high-quality assistance.

*** Advanced Language Understanding:**

* Copilot Pro has a broader vocabulary and better comprehension of complex language structures.

* It can handle nuanced queries, technical jargon, and domain-specific terminology with greater proficiency.

* This makes it an excellent choice for users who work in specialized fields or have specific requirements.

Increased Image Generation Capacity:

* While the free version allows up to 15 image generations per day, Copilot Pro offers a more generous quota of up to 100 images per day.

* If you frequently create visual content, such as logos, artwork, or diagrams, this expanded capacity can be quite valuable.

Priority Access to Updates and New Features:

* Subscribers to Copilot Pro receive priority access to new features, enhancements, and improvements.

* As the service evolves, you’ll be among the first to experience the latest capabilities.

In summary, Copilot Pro is designed for users who require faster, more accurate, and context-aware assistance, along with additional image generation capabilities. If these features align with your needs, the Pro version is worth considering! 😊🚀[1] [2].

Which should you choose, Google or Microsoft? The best tool may depend on whether you work in the Google or Microsoft ecosystem. If you work for an organization that uses Microsoft 365, Copilot would be a natural choice because it integrates with other Microsoft products.

Using AI Tools to Conduct Background Research

The use case we find most compelling for using AI software is conducting background research as part of a literature review. Most proposals, particularly the more complex ones, require the proposal team to conduct desk research. The research questions may address political stability in a country, the most pressing health issues in a particular region of the world, or the demographics of a country, state, or city. AI tools like Copilot can do a good job at summarizing key issues and notable events for questions like this, pulling information from reputable sources such as the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and government websites.

If you are using an AI tool that does not store your search history, you must remember to copy both your query and the results (with the relevant source links) and paste them into another platform, such as Microsoft OneNote or Microsoft Loop. Other, non-Microsoft options to save your queries include a document generator like Google Docs, a wiki like Notion, Slab, or Capacities, or a virtual notebook like Evernote. Wherever you end up storing your chat history, you’ll want to document some information about the query for reference later, such as the date of the query and which AI software you used. If you use AI-generated material in your proposal, depending on funder guidelines and your organization’s policies on AI use, you may need to declare this information in the proposal.

Is AI Going to Eliminate the Need for Proposal Writers?

Eventually, AI tools may be able to produce a decent rough draft of grant proposals. Currently, these tools are still in their infancy and are not about to displace grant writers. Even when AI may be adept enough to prepare a decent first draft of a proposal, a human will still need to review the draft to ensure the information the tool has pulled from external sources on the internet is trustworthy and correctly cited. Additionally, AI tools are useful for catching spelling and grammatical mistakes, but they are not perfect and can introduce errors. Human editors are, and may continue to be, required. Additionally, a grant proposal is not a work of fiction. The solutions proposed must be realistic, relevant, and evidence-based. It’s difficult to imagine a scenario where an AI tool will be able to and can be trusted to do it all: Summarize the solicitation without error, prepare accurate CVs, draft a technical narrative that is innovative and responsive based on information drawn from 100% reliable sources, and produce a budget and budget narrative with minimal input by applicants.

Should You Use AI for Your Grant Writing?

What AI software can do successfully is summarize content, and this is its greatest benefit. While our recommendation may change in a few months, for now, we recommend using a free AI tool such as Microsoft Copilot or Google for limited tasks, such as background research and simplifying awkward or cumbersome writing. Do you still need to review the results with a critical eye? Yes, you still need to verify the sources the AI tools cite and confirm that any grammatical fixes it suggests for your proposal draft are necessary and correct. Even though it’s not a completely hands-off process, using AI for these use cases can be beneficial.

Regarding AI software costs, if your organization uses Microsoft 365 for its operations and can afford it, you may want to consider the enterprise version of Microsoft Copilot. It costs $30/month or $360/year per user, which is not cheap. However, if using Copilot saves time and produces better work, the expense may be worth it for a select group of staff members. The advantages of Copilot include its integration with other Microsoft products, its ability to search for organization-generated content stored on SharePoint, and its protection of organization data.

Learn More

We recommend taking a course to learn more about using AI. Google recently announced Google AI Essentials, and courses are also available on Microsoft-owned LinkedIn Learning.

How and whether to use AI to write grant proposals is a contentious topic. If you have experience using AI tools like Google’s Gemini or Microsoft’s Copilot as part of your grant writing process, we invite you to share your experiences in the comment section below.

April 6, 2024

Courses on proposal writing typically focus on the importance of writing clearly and avoiding jargon. While important, these tips alone will not lead to a winning proposal. Writing a high-quality proposal also involves remembering that proposals are scored, not read. If you write a well-crafted proposal but fail to consider how reviewers will read and evaluate it, it may not score well.

🎯For greater success in grant writing, remember that proposals are scored, not read. 

Writing for the Target Audience

Grant writing is challenging for several reasons. One of the most significant is the typically short window between the day a solicitation is posted and the day the proposal is due. A recurring reason proposals are unsuccessful is that, due to the short turnaround, proposal teams feel intense pressure to start writing before they are clear about what they intend to propose. Sometimes the proposal team puts itself under pressure. Other times, the organization’s leadership pressures the proposal team, believing that proposal writing must begin immediately to meet the submission deadline. The problem with this thinking is that if the writing starts too early, the team has not had adequate time to conduct background research or project design, which means whatever is written early in the process will often need to be rewritten once that design work eventually happens. 

Successful proposals must check all the boxes. They must meet the core requirements related to page limits and font size while also addressing the funder’s expressed and implied needs. Information on the proposal’s more procedural requirements is usually easy to find in the solicitation. However, it can be harder to determine which elements of a proposal the funder considers most important. This is where the evaluation criteria offer clues.

Allocating Proposal Resources Based on the Evaluation Criteria

When a funder’s review panel evaluates a proposal, the members score it against a set of criteria. Many solicitations, such as those published by the U.S. government, list the evaluation criteria so applicants understand the evaluation process. The criteria often include weights. Other funders, such as private foundations, may not provide detailed or weighted criteria but often highlight features a proposal should include to be considered competitive.

If they are included in the solicitation, the evaluation criteria should influence the proposal’s development from the earliest stages, beginning with the proposal outline. For example, the writer will want to reserve adequate space in the proposal for those sections weighted most heavily in the evaluation criteria. 

Second, the evaluation criteria should also influence how much time and resources a proposal team dedicates to each section, so that a section that accounts for 30% of the score should be prioritized over one that accounts for only 10%. The evaluation criteria also play a role in the project design phase, as they often indicate what reviewers will look for when evaluating the project’s activities and anticipated outcomes. Having the criteria prominently posted in the proposal draft can help keep the proposal on track by reminding the writer and technical contributors of sections deserving extra attention. A simple way to highlight these sections is to insert the evaluation criteria or scoring weights as comments next to the relevant headings.

Writing for Reviewers 

The funder’s review panel may consist of several individuals. Unless the proposals are relatively short, it’s safe to assume that not all reviewers will read every proposal they receive in-depth from beginning to end. Some reviewers may read the executive summary in full and skim the rest of the proposal. Others may skim the entire proposal, stopping occasionally to study information in graphics and tables. Others may skim most sections but will read more carefully those parts of the proposal that relate to their specific areas of expertise. Writing a high-scoring proposal involves anticipating how reviewers may interact with it, so it scores well regardless of whether they read every word, skim sections, or focus on or skip tables.

Regardless of whether a reviewer is skimming a proposal or giving it a thorough read, all reviewers rank proposals against the same evaluation criteria. As noted above, proposals are scored and not read. This is why letting the evaluation criteria guide the proposal’s development is essential. In practical terms, it means potentially spending more time on some sections than you might otherwise. For example, if the evaluation criteria indicate that management and staffing are worth 25% of the score, you may need to start this section earlier and spend more time refining it than you otherwise would.

Accommodating Reviewers with Different Reading Styles

You can employ a few techniques to ensure that in-depth readers, skimmers, table avoiders, and table lovers all rank your proposal highly.

• Readers. To meet the needs of those reading the proposal in-depth, it will serve you well to write in clear, grammatically correct sentences that logically progress. Those who read a proposal carefully and sequentially, beginning on page one and progressing page by page to the end, are more likely to pick up on internal inconsistencies than those who skim a proposal. Internal consistencies include conflicting descriptions of project activities or misspellings of key terminology. For readers who may closely read every page of your proposal, it’s particularly valuable to have your proposal copy edited.

• Skimmers. Skimmers peruse headings and subheadings. Writing informative and descriptive headings makes it easier for skimmers to identify the sections they want to read in full. Descriptive headings can also be used to underscore important points. To illustrate, if you wish to emphasize the number of local staff on your proposed project, under the heading “Management and Staffing,” you could introduce a subheading like “Local Staff in Key Positions” instead of listing all local and non-local staff under the general heading “Staffing.” The solicitation often dictates major headings (e.g., Introduction or Project Description), but descriptive headings should be an option for subheadings and run-in headings.

☞ This is a run-in heading.‍ ‍A run-in heading is often used for level 4 headings.

Additionally, because skimmers may do a light review of the majority of the proposal and skip some sections entirely, you’ll want to sprinkle your organization’s key strengths (i.e., your win themes) throughout the proposal to maximize the chance that all reviewers will encounter them, regardless of their review style.

• Table avoiders. Using tables judiciously in a proposal can be a great way to save space, consolidate information, and make it easier to understand. However, not everyone likes to pore over tables. One solution to help those inclined to skip tables is to add descriptive captions. Descriptive captions describe what a table or graphic depicts. The captions should be complete sentences, not just a word or two. You might write, “AMAZING project chose target districts X, Y, and Z based on preliminary data indicating that these areas are the most vulnerable to climate-change related disasters,” instead of a cursory caption like “Table 3. Target Districts.” Second, in the body of the proposal, you should reference every table before it appears in the text. For example, if your table lists and describes the regions where your project will take place, you should introduce this table in the text by saying something like, “The AMAZING project will work in three districts (see Table 3).” Doing these two things—the descriptive caption and the reference—will alert readers to the table and may encourage more of them to spend time looking at it. These same strategies also work to call attention to graphics.

• Table lovers. A subset of skimmers and readers will thoroughly review your tables. To help these readers, your tables should be easy to read and interpret, and they should contain data not found elsewhere in the proposal. You don’t want to frustrate reviewers by densely packing the table with unclear information in a too-small font. The tables should be in a logical, visually appealing format, using color and bold fonts to increase readability. The table should also stand on its own. What we mean by this is that if the table were cut and pasted into a blank document, it should still make sense. Strategies to do this include avoiding abbreviations in your tables, or, if you use them, defining the terms directly beneath the table rather than in a traditional footnote at the bottom of the page. The table’s caption and column headings should also be understood at a glance. Table lovers may refer back to tables multiple times during their review, so another critical step is to make the tables easy to find by listing them in the table of contents (ditto for any graphics).

Summary: Plan Before Writing by Leveraging Evaluation Criteria

Planning is essential to ensure your proposal scores well. Unless a grant proposal is a short, fill-in-the-blank application, it’s a best practice to sketch out what you will say and where you will say it before you begin writing. One of the most helpful things you can do as you work on your proposal outline is to look for clues in the evaluation criteria about what the reviewers expect to see in each section and how important the funder regards each section. To improve your success rate, your proposal should address all points outlined in the evaluation criteria, with extra attention to the most heavily weighted areas.

October 4, 2023

Finding grant opportunities to apply for is central to most non-profit organizations. While a grant database is ideal for conducting prospect research, many nonprofits lack access to subscription databases and instead rely on free sources such as Google and other search engines. A Google search on grant funding can generate an unwieldy number of results. While some results will be relevant, most will not, and it can take a significant amount of time to separate valid hits from false leads.

To help those of you relying on Google to find funding opportunities, we have several suggestions on how to structure your search so that you get the best and most relevant results.

Tips for Using Google to Find Grant Information

1. Identify exactly what information you need. Before entering anything in a search bar, it’s important to be clear about the information you seek. For example, if you want to learn more about a funding opportunity or program that you’ve already identified, you can search for more information about the program by putting its name in quotes in the search bar. By putting quotes around the name, you are telling Google you are looking for this exact name. If you want to know how to apply to the program, you could add AND apply after the program name, which can help pull up information specifically on how to apply for this program. By entering terms specific to the information you seek, you have a better chance of having the exact webpage you need pop up on the first page of the search results.

2. Use Google’s Advanced Search function. You can use Google’s Advanced Search to find information such as grant opportunities on a particular topic or from a particular funder. If your search generates quality results, you can save your search parameters to your favorite note program so that you can easily run the same search again. For example, if you want to find opportunities related to climate, you can ask Google to search for pages containing the words apply grants and “climate.” A helpful feature of the Advanced Search function is that you can specify a “last update” date to surface the most recent information on a topic (or, in this case, a program). You can also narrow your results by adding a language and a region.

3. Search websites for specific content. If you want to avoid having to scroll around a foundation’s website to find information on its opportunities, you can have Google search for pages on the foundation’s website that contain the word “opportunities.” Below are the results we got when we entered site:nsf.gov opportunities into the search bar. You can also use Google’s Advanced Search function to do the same thing by entering the name of a site or domain as part of your query.

4. Conduct a Boolean search using AND, OR, or NOT to refine results. Using the connectors AND, OR, or NOT (important: AND, OR, and NOT must be capitalized to signal to Google that they are filter words) can help narrow or broaden the results. You could type Gates Foundation AND grant application to generate results related to applying for grants (note that if you use the words apply or application without “grant,” some of the results may relate to applying for jobs). If you want to conduct a more flexible search, you can use OR, such as grants OR funding opportunities. To learn more tips about conducting a Boolean search, see this article on the topic from Scribbr: “Boolean Operators | Quick Guide, Examples & Tips.”

5. Search web pages for keywords. Once you get your search results, you may see several websites or pages that could have the information you need. When you open a page, use Control + F (PC) or Command + F (Mac) to search the page for your keywords. This search works well for things like searching on specific application guidelines, such as the application deadline, eligibility, or page limits. When you use this function, the word you are searching for will be highlighted, and you can navigate to each mention using the up and down arrows in the search bar.

6. Use “awards” as a keyword. In addition to using the words “grant” and “funding opportunity” in your Google searches, it can also work well to search using the words “awards,” “grantees,” or “recipients” combined with the name of the funder. One of the benefits of looking at a funder’s list of grantees is that you can read about projects the funder has supported, which can help you determine if your organization or project would be a good match with the funder’s interests. Additionally, by researching grantees working in areas similar to your organization's, you can identify funders and funding programs that might be a good fit.

7. Use Google Alerts. Another tip is to leverage Google Alerts, which will send you email notifications when Google finds content matching your search terms. Of all the tips, this one is the least reliable. Google Alerts seems to work best for news items related to a particular funder rather than for finding funding opportunities. If you have a short list of funders you are interested in, a better method is to subscribe to each funder’s mailing list to receive updates directly from the funder.

Google Bard’s Suggestions for Using Google to Find Grant Opportunities

In addition to the strategies above, you can also ask Google’s new AI assistant, Bard, for help to see what suggestions it has to direct you to the most relevant content on Google.

To the question, “What are some of the best ways to use Google Search to find grant opportunities?” Bard produced the following response:

Here are some tips on how to use Google Search to find grant opportunities:

1. Use specific keywords. When you're searching for grants, use as specific keywords as possible. For example, instead of searching for "grants for nonprofits," try searching for "grants for nonprofits that support education in underserved communities."

2. Use the advanced search features. Google's advanced search features let you narrow your results by date, language, file type, and more. This can be helpful if you're looking for specific types of grants, such as grants for a particular cause or grants from a particular funder.

3. Search for grant databases. There are many grant databases available online, and many are free to use. Google can help you find these databases by searching for keywords like "grant database" or "grant directory."

4. Search for government grant websites. Government agencies at all levels offer grants to nonprofits and other organizations. To find government grant opportunities, Google for keywords like "federal grants," "state grants," or "local grants."

5. Search for foundation websites. Foundations are a major source of grant funding for nonprofits. To find grants from foundations, Google for keywords like "foundation directory" or "foundation database."

Here are some additional tips:

Use Google Alerts. Google Alerts can send you email notifications whenever new results are published for your chosen search terms. This is a great way to stay up to date on new grant opportunities.

Follow grantmakers on social media. Many grantmakers are active on social media, where they often announce new grant opportunities. To find grantmakers on social media, search for their names or keywords like "grantmaker" or "foundation."

Network with other nonprofits. Talk to other nonprofits in your community to see what grants they've applied for and been awarded. They may be able to give you some good leads on grant opportunities that are a good fit for your organization.

Finding grant opportunities can be a time-consuming process, but Google can help you make it easier. By following the tips above, you can identify the best grant opportunities for your organization and increase your chances of success.

AI doesn’t always produce correct or helpful information. In this case, Bard did a good job, and we agree with its summary of tips. Some of the tips are stronger than others—as mentioned above, we haven’t found Google Alerts to be that helpful, and using social media can be a time sink—but all of the suggestions are reasonable.

Conclusion

Whether Google is your only way to find opportunities or you are using Google to supplement research you’ve completed in a funder database, Google can be a valuable tool in finding and tracking grant opportunities and funders. The number one tip for finding relevant opportunities with Google is to be specific in your search terms. The second tip is to use Google’s Advanced Search function to help refine your search terms.

If none of these suggestions lead to relevant results, it may be worth investing in a funder database. Funder databases are the easiest, most efficient way to find grant opportunities. And many databases offer additional features, like the ability to store search results and even manage grant proposals. To learn more about the various database options, please see our post “Choosing a Grant Database Based on Your Needs and Budget.” We’ve also compiled a list of different types of funder databases in our resources section.

Finally, if you want an economical database covering funders active in the United States, Canada, and internationally, you might consider GrantStation. GrantStation is one of the most affordable databases. You can learn more about GrantStation’s pricing at https://grantstation.com/product/grantstation-membership.

August 1, 2023

When you come across a funding opportunity that looks like a good fit, starting work on it immediately can be tempting, especially if the deadline is only a few weeks away. But jumping into the writing phase without carefully reading the solicitation is always risky. Among other things, it can lead you to miss an important deadline: the submission deadline for questions to the funder regarding the solicitation. To ensure your proposal will be responsive and compliant with the funder’s guidelines, you should always seek clarification from the funder on anything you don’t understand whenever you have the opportunity to do so.

In addition to using the question period to ask about the proposal guidelines, applicants can also provide feedback on areas they believe the funder may have overlooked. For example, if the proposal deadline falls on or near a major holiday, a potential applicant can use the question period to ask whether the funder would be willing to move the deadline back, which the funder is often willing to do. Or perhaps the funder provided conflicting information in the solicitation, listing two submission deadlines. Pointing out such a discrepancy would benefit all potential applicants.

To maximize your ability to ask questions, it’s useful to maintain a list of potential issues that may need clarification. The areas where questions typically come up tend to fall into one of six buckets: (1) eligibility, (2) formatting, (3) scope, (4) personnel, (5) budget, and (6) partnerships.

To help you think about the questions you might need or want to ask, we’ve compiled a list of common questions under each area below. The list consists of examples of questions only and is not meant to be prescriptive or exhaustive: Not all the areas or questions below will apply to every proposal, and the questions most relevant to the types of proposals you typically respond to may not be included.

Most questions about a proposal’s expected structure and content should be answered during a close read of the solicitation and any other materials the funder may have provided. With this in mind, as you read the solicitation, you should actively look for answers to your standard questions. If you cannot find an answer or are uncertain how to follow the solicitation’s directives on a particular matter, you should note this and submit your questions to the funder for clarification.

Funders handle questions about solicitations in various ways. Some funders will list a deadline for submitting questions in the solicitation. This is the approach that government agencies take. There may not be a fixed deadline for submitting questions for government opportunities that remain open for several years. Instead, the funder will advise prospective applicants to email their questions to the contact person (typically a program officer) listed on the opportunity posting. In some cases, the funder will post FAQs on its website and update them periodically as new questions are submitted.

While the opportunity to ask clarifying questions is valuable and helps you better understand a funding opportunity, you must frame your questions carefully. Do not include identifying or confidential information in your questions, as they may become public. If the solicitation directs applicants to submit questions by a specific date, it almost always means the funder will publish the questions received—often verbatim—along with the answers. Funders post the Q&As publicly to ensure a fair and transparent process where all applicants can access the same information.

Questions to consider when reading a solicitation

1. ELIGIBILITY

Is your organization eligible to apply for the opportunity you are considering? Eligibility is an essential question, yet many solicitations fail to provide sufficient information for prospective applicants to determine whether they are eligible. Confusion around eligibility comes up most frequently when the eligibility guidelines include thresholds for experience or knowledge, as in “applicants must have [x amount of] expertise in [type of service or project, tool, or relationship with an administrative body]. Because applicants want to see themselves in the eligible group, and interpreting qualification standards can be nuanced, uncertainty around eligibility frequently arises in these situations. Eligibility is an area where you don’t want any confusion because the funder will not read your application if you are not eligible.

Eligibility Questions

Are there any registrations, accreditations, or certifications to complete before applying? If so, is it acceptable for them to be pending at the time of the proposal submission, or must they be finalized? What documentation is acceptable to document compliance?

Is it possible for your organization to submit multiple proposals in response to the opportunity? While particularly relevant for academic institutions, where more than one faculty member or department may be interested in pursuing an opportunity, this question can also arise in larger non-profit organizations with multiple programmatic units.

Can we apply if we are based in [name of place], but our proposed project will take place in [x place]? If the eligibility guidelines include geographic limitations, you must be clear that you are eligible to apply if you want to conduct activities in a different location (state or country) from where your organization is headquartered. For some opportunities, eligible applicants must be based in the country, and international organizations with registered offices in the country but headquartered elsewhere are ineligible to apply.

Are past performance references required? You will want to know as soon as possible whether the funder requires references for past work similar to the proposed project (e.g., scope, cost, complexity, or all three). If you do not have a strong past performance section, depending on how much it counts in the evaluation, your proposal may not achieve a competitive score. If the funder explicitly states that all qualified applicants must be able to demonstrate experience of a certain kind—and your organization does not have that experience—your organization may not meet the basic eligibility requirements unless there are other options to demonstrate competency. In some cases, the funder may allow past performance qualifications to be met by another organization added to the applicant team through a partnership agreement.

2. FORMATTING

Solicitations almost always include formatting guidance. For the funder, providing detailed formatting guidance to applicants helps ensure all proposals are structured similarly and contain the same amount of content, facilitating their evaluation. If a submitted proposal does not follow the guidelines (e.g., page limits, font size, or file names), the funder can quickly eliminate it.

Although it benefits everyone to have explicit formatting guidelines, solicitations sometimes provide limited or no guidance, leaving applicants wondering whether there are any limitations on what they can submit. To some applicants, the absence of detailed guidance may seem beneficial, allowing them to prepare the proposal as they see fit and in a format they believe is most effective. For other applicants, the absence of guidance creates uncertainty and a strong desire for clarification. The last thing an applicant wants is to spend days, weeks, or even months preparing a proposal only to learn that what they submitted wasn’t at all what the funder expected, resulting in a low score or outright rejection.

Formatting Questions

Page limits. Are there page limits for any or all sections?

Character limits. If the guidelines mention a character limit for certain sections, is it clear whether the limit includes spaces?

Word limits. If a proposal has a word limit, should headings be counted toward the limit, or only the body text?

Fonts. Are there any restrictions on what fonts can be used for the proposal?

• Is it permissible to use a smaller font for tables, captions, footnotes, and text boxes?

• Can headers be in a different font style or size than the body text?

Hyperlinks

• Are hyperlinks allowed in the document? When in doubt, include the full URL in the document, but do not hyperlink it.

• Can the hyperlink be “hidden” behind the display text, or must the full URL appear? If you do not receive a response, assume the full hyperlink must be provided.

Margins. What are the required margins for the proposal? If you do not get an answer and are submitting to a U.S.-based funder, it is safest to use standard 1-inch margins.

Paper size. What paper size should the proposal be formatted for? This question may arise if you submit a proposal to a funder based in another country. For example, if you are based in Europe and submitting a proposal to a U.S.-based funder, make sure you set your proposal to 8.5 × 11-inch paper (U.S. letter size), not A4.

Graphics. Is it possible to insert images, figures, and tables? If so, are there any limits on size or placement? Typically, it is not a problem to insert figures, photographs, and tables into a proposal. For some types of proposals, like research proposals, tables and figures are critical and must be included. For non-research proposals, particularly proposals submitted through online application systems where you need to paste your response into a form, you may only be able to insert text. Additionally, some funders allow figures and tables but require them to be submitted in an annex rather than in the proposal narrative.

Appendices. Are supporting materials allowed? A solicitation may clearly state whether you can add an appendix and, if so, what you can submit. And often, a funder will require that certain materials be submitted as an appendix, such as key personnel's CVs. Still, clarification may be needed even when the solicitation provides some guidance around appendices. In addition to checking about restrictions around what types of materials can be included, it may also be relevant to ask the following:

• Are there restrictions on the font style and size for the appendices?

• Should the appendices be PDFs?

• Is there a page limit for the appendices?

• Should the appendices be merged into the proposal narrative or submitted as a separate file?

Identifying information. Is there required content for the headers and footers? Some funders want specific content in the header or footer, such as the name of the applying organization, the funding opportunity name, and the solicitation number. If the funder expects specific content in the headers and footers, they will usually state this, but it is good to be alert to this potential requirement when reading the solicitation. The same goes for page numbers. Usually, all pages should be numbered sequentially—but not always. For example, some U.S. government agencies use a proposal submission platform that adds page numbers to the file, and applicants are explicitly told not to number the pages.

Supporting content. Can you have, or should you include, a table of contents, an abbreviation list, and a reference list—and do they count against the page limits?

Language. What language must or can the proposal be written in? Although uncommon, proposals are sometimes accepted in multiple languages, giving you and your team options if you are multilingual.

Templates. Are there templates that must be used for any section of the proposal (e.g., narrative, cost proposal, or appendices, such as CVs)? Always review the solicitation thoroughly to look for references to templates. Templates are sometimes included in the solicitation as blank forms, but are often only referenced and must be downloaded separately from the funder’s website.

☞ Interested in formatting tips? Read “Formatting Tips to Make Your Grant Proposal a Standout”

3. SCOPE

Issues of scope—or the boundaries of what the funder intends or is willing to fund—are typically opportunity-specific. They touch on the project's where, how, what, and when, as well as matters of scale. Although scope questions can come up with funding opportunities of any size or complexity, they most frequently occur with solicitations for ambitious projects that will take place over several years (e.g., a 5-year grant vs. a 1-year grant) that plan to reach a large number of beneficiaries and achieve a lengthy list of outcomes and deliverables. If you read a solicitation and think, “Do we need to work in all these places and meet all these goals?” it’s a sign you need greater clarity on the funder’s vision for what proposals should cover. Another clue that you might have a scope question is when you read the solicitation and immediately think, “There’s no way we can address all these things in 15 pages.”

Scope Questions

Are there geographic limits? Questions of scope might include clarifying the funder's geographic focus for the opportunity and whether you need to work in all geographic areas mentioned in the proposal or only a subset.

Is there any flexibility? If something in the solicitation’s description of the desired project outcomes seems like it might be difficult or impossible to implement or achieve within the project period or grant amount, you can ask the funder if it would be willing to be flexible on a programmatic requirement, such as a milestone for a particular deliverable.

Can aspects of the proposal be clarified? Scope questions seek clarification of the scope of work described in the solicitation. If you read the solicitation and are not sure you truly understand what the funder wants, you might need to ask, “When you say this [quote language from proposal], do you mean [enter your interpretation]?” An indicator that you need to ask this question is when members of the proposal team disagree on how to interpret a section of the solicitation.

How much detail is needed? When addressing a proposal requirement, it may not be clear how detailed your response should be. For example, you might ask a clarifying question about how much detail is expected in the past performance section. Does the funder want the name of the funder, the name of the project, the project period, the name of the program officer, the funding amount, and a summary of the project and its outcomes—or is some information required while other information is nice to have but not essential?

Is this a preliminary application? Another scope-related question is whether the opportunity is funded. This question can come up, particularly with letters of interest (LOIs). It is not always clear whether an LOI is intended as a screening step, in which applicants with the strongest LOIs are invited to submit full proposals, or whether it is actually funded. Ideally, the funder will clearly state in the solicitation what the LOI represents and whether it is a screening tool or an abbreviated proposal process that will result in a small grant. Less commonly, funders use an LOI to provide an initial round of funding to selected applicants for pilot projects, expecting the pilot project to generate data to support a full proposal.

4. PERSONNEL

Personnel questions may concern qualifications, employment status, project team roles and responsibilities, or the definition of “key personnel.” The definition of “key personnel” varies by funder. Some funders leave it to the applicant to define what “key” means, while others state explicitly which positions are considered key. Still others may provide level-of-effort guidelines, such as “Key personnel must be budgeted for a minimum of x% FTE [full-time equivalent] on the grant.”

Personnel Questions

Is it allowable to bid consultants for the key positions? The people you put forward for key personnel positions strongly influence how a funder rates the overall strength of your proposal. For some opportunities, a funder may want only an organization’s employees in key positions, while consultants may be acceptable for non-key roles. To guarantee that those proposed for key positions will actually show up if the proposal leads to an award, many funders will ask applicants to submit signed letters of commitment from each of the key personnel named in the proposal, regardless of whether the individuals are employees of the lead applicant organization, work for a partner organization, or are currently consultants. Funders expect the individuals named to key roles to serve in those roles. If someone named to a key position leaves before an award is made or at any point during the award period, the funder will want an explanation and will not allow you to fill the role until they approve the replacement.

Is it allowable to put “TBD’ for some positions? When a funding opportunity arises, you may not have staff members to fill all key positions or the time to conduct extensive external recruitment to find qualified candidates. Sometimes a funder will allow you to enter “to be determined” (TBD) for non-key roles as a placeholder. Even when using TBD is allowed, you should try to avoid it, as leaving any required position unfilled can weaken your proposal. An exception is when you must fill one or more general or junior positions that do not require unique skills and can be easily and quickly filled if you receive an award.

5. BUDGET

A proposal budget is another area where the questions can be very specific to the solicitation at hand, although a few questions are standard fare, including:

Are indirect costs allowable? General operating costs (aka “indirects”) generate unrestricted funds for an organization that allow it to pay for office rent, administrative staff salaries, and other expenses not tied to a specific project. Before you invest too much effort into a proposal, it is essential to learn whether the funder allows for a percentage of your organization’s indirect costs to be added to the proposal’s budget and, if so, how much. Most funders list their policy on indirects in their solicitations. But when it is unclear how to interpret the indirect policy, or if no mention of indirects appears in the solicitation, you need to seek clarification as soon as possible. While no organization is excited about a grant that doesn’t allow for indirect costs, for some organizations, indirects will dictate whether to pursue an opportunity: If a funder doesn’t allow for indirects, or if the indirect rate is too low, the organization cannot afford to pursue the grant.

Are matching funds (cost share) required? Another important budget-related question to clarify is whether the funder expects applicants to provide any matching funds. The issue of match touches both eligibility to apply for an opportunity and the feasibility of managing any resulting award. If an opportunity requires an organization to meet match requirements, the applicant must pledge a specified amount (usually a fixed percentage) toward the project costs. If you cannot identify sources of matching funds by the time the proposal is due, your organization will not meet one of the funder’s stated eligibility requirements. Matching funds (aka cost-share) requirements cannot be met by giving the funder a vague promise of potential sources that could generate matching funds if the proposal is awarded. Funders expect a detailed plan for how the applicant will fulfill the match requirement. Raising matching funds can be especially difficult for organizations that rely on a single funding source. For example, an organization might receive most of its funding from a single government agency. To apply for a new opportunity with a match requirement posted by this same federal agency, the organization must identify non-federal funds. One challenge with cost-share situations like this is that federal agency grants often have large budgets, which can make the cost-share quite high and potentially unattainable if the organization has limited funding outside federal grants.

☞ To learn more about cost share, read “Making Sense of Cost Share”

6. PARTNERSHIPS

Partnership questions usually concern who qualifies as a partner and how partners’ information should be presented in the proposal.

Can an organization be a partner even though it doesn’t qualify as a prime? In the eligibility section of a solicitation, a funder may state that only certain types of organizations are eligible to apply, such as U.S.-based nonprofit organizations. If it is not clear from the solicitation, it may be appropriate to ask if organizations ineligible to serve as prime (i.e., the lead applicant) can still serve as partners (i.e., subrecipients) on the grant.

How should the partners’ information be integrated into the application? For more complex opportunities, funders will expect an applicant to partner with other organizations. The funder may even require partnerships, sometimes specifying the types of partners to include in the proposal. For example, a funder might insist that national or international organizations intending to apply as the lead organization must partner with a local organization. In cases like this, where the lead applicant is expected to submit a proposal in partnership with other organizations, the solicitation will almost always specify where and how partner information should be included in the narrative and cost proposals. Grant opportunities from private foundations are not always explicit about how to incorporate partners into the proposal, so follow-up questions to the funder may be necessary. Note that requirements imposed on the prime typically flow down to the partners. For example, if the funder requires applicants to provide 20% matching funds, each subrecipient must also include 20% in their budgets. You should always seek clarification if there is any doubt about which requirements apply to the prime and which to the subrecipients, because the answer may influence whether it’s feasible for certain organizations to join as partners.

Summary

If you want to prepare a proposal with the greatest chance of success, it helps immeasurably to be as clear as possible about the proposal guidelines.

When you read a solicitation, it’s helpful to have a list of questions in the back of your mind so that you can be alert and primed to spot the answers. Your questions may concern deadlines, deliverables, proposal structure, eligibility, budget requirements, or scope. From your experience working on other proposals, you may have identified several questions that you must know the answers to before you decide to respond to an opportunity or begin writing. Examples of the former might be questions about eligibility or financial implications, such as whether the opportunity requires matching funds. Examples in the latter category might include questions about the proposal’s layout or structure.

Ideally, answers to most, if not all, of your questions should be found in the solicitation. However, funders are sometimes unclear or fail to include critical information. For these situations, it’s essential to take advantage of opportunities to ask the funder questions about the solicitation. If there is an open call for questions on a solicitation, funders will generally collect all questions, remove duplicates, and publicly post them and their answers. Because the questions you submit will likely be released to a public forum, you should review them to ensure they do not mention your organization’s name, allude to your organization’s planned approach to the opportunity, or reveal your organization’s strengths or weaknesses. If the solicitation does not mention a formal question period, you may be able to submit your questions directly to the program officer listed as the contact person for the opportunity.

☞ To read more about contacting program officers, see “When Is It Appropriate to Contact Program Officers?”

June 1, 2023

If you work on certain kinds of grant proposals, particularly proposals for research grants, you must cite sources that support your proposed solution and provide evidence of related work and data. Proposals for community-based projects often require references, such as citations to government reports, public datasets, or news articles. Proposal teams often struggle to create systems for organizing background research and correctly citing sources in their proposals. The result is that decisions on how to manage references are often made only after the proposal is well underway, and references are scattered across multiple locations. It’s much easier and less stressful if you decide at the beginning of the proposal process which tools and methods you will use. Doing so will help everyone working on the proposal, from the writers and subject matter experts to the reviewers and editors.

Several options exist for organizing references and adding citations to grant proposals or other documents, such as project reports and research papers. In this post, we highlight three citation tools (aka reference managers) we’ve used to collect references and generate bibliographies for grant proposals. Two options are free, and the third offers a 30-day free trial. 

Before we discuss each tool, we want to provide a quick overview of what a reference manager is and why you may want to add one to your proposal-development toolbox.

WHAT IS A REFERENCE MANAGER?

A reference manager is software that helps you organize and format your references. Reference managers typically share standard features, such as the ability to collect and format citations before exporting them for use in applications such as Microsoft Word. Many reference managers also integrate with other software, support collaboration, and import content from various sources.

Many reference managers also allow you to search for relevant articles within the tool and include features similar to a PDF reader (e.g., importing and reading PDFs, highlighting text, and adding notes). 

WHY USE A REFERENCE MANAGER?

If you are writing anything that requires background research, including grant proposals, a reference manager can be extremely valuable. Without one, you’ll have to collect your references in a Word document or something similar and, depending on the required style, manually format the citations before pasting them into your document. You’ll also need to find a safe place to store the reference list and copies of articles and other source material, so they can be easily found, accessed, and shared. With a reference manager, you can do all of this—find relevant articles, add and format citations, read and annotate PDFs, and collaborate with others—using a single tool.

One of the main advantages of reference managers is that they make it much easier to insert and format citations. Scholarly journals, online news sites, and government agencies each use a specific style for referenced information. While the styles can be very similar in what information needs to be included, there are often nuances that are easy to miss in the order in which the information should appear (e.g., the date of publication before the name of the publisher, or vice versa).  If you use a reference manager, you can use the software to search for and select the citations you need and automatically change the citation format to the required style. 

The ability to quickly change styles is reason enough to use a reference manager, especially if you have a long list of references that need to be formatted in an unfamiliar style.  Another benefit of a reference manager is that it can replace other Cloud-based storage options. Because many reference managers can be used to find and save full-text articles, you can use them instead of Google Drive or Dropbox for storing your background research.

If you’re thinking: But Microsoft Word has a reference tool—why not just use that? That’s a good question. The answer is that Microsoft’s reference tool is for formatting citations that you’ve added to your document. It isn’t a tool for conducting or managing background research, or for reading and annotating PDFs. However, if you need to add just a couple of footnotes to a proposal, a reference manager is unnecessary, and Word’s reference tool is fine. Even in that case, there may still be a benefit to setting up a reference manager. If you do, you’ll be prepared to manage a more extensive list of references should the need arise when working on future proposals. Additionally, using a dedicated tool to collect and organize references can reduce the risk of data loss from staff turnover. Instead of having references for various proposals scattered across personal files that will disappear when someone leaves, a reference manager keeps reference lists accessible to multiple people in the organization, ensuring that past research is not lost.

Overview of Three Reference Managers: Mendeley, Zotero, and Paperpile

Below, we summarize the key features of three reference managers—Mendeley, Zotero, and Paperpile—and suggest use cases for each. We chose these three for their overall usability, features, customization, and affordability.  If you’ve used reference managers in the past, you may be surprised that EndNote is not on our list. EndNote is the best-known reference manager and the only one many researchers consider using. We’re not profiling EndNote because it is more expensive and thus out of reach for many nonprofits. However, EndNote has many features that make it particularly useful for effective collaboration, so it is worth considering if you can afford it. At the time of this writing, an EndNote license goes for $248 ($135 for students). EndNote offers a 30-day free trial. EndNote also offers a free option called EndNote Basic, which includes 2GB of storage and limited features.

MENDELEY 

Mendeley, owned by the publishing company Elsevier, offers many of the same core features as EndNote but offers more affordable subscriptions based on your storage needs. For $55/year, you get 5GB of storage. If you need unlimited storage, you can upgrade to their Max plan for $165/year. Mendeley also offers a free plan with 2GB of storage.

Like EndNote, Mendeley supports collaboration. If you are working on a grant proposal with others, you can create a group space in Mendeley for the proposal where you and your colleagues can add references and notes. Additionally, as with EndNote, you can build a personal library in Mendeley to reference journal articles, web content, and imported PDFs. If you are writing your document in MS Word, Mendeley has an integration that allows you to add citations from your Mendeley library directly into your Word document. 

Mendeley’s features include:

• Automatically generating bibliographies

• Collaborating easily with other researchers online

• Importing papers from other research software

• Finding relevant papers based on what you’re reading

• Accessing your papers from anywhere online

Mendeley is available online or via the desktop app. Mendeley also offers the Mendeley Web Importer, which lets you import references into your Mendeley account as you browse the web.

Who is Mendeley for? Mendeley is a good option if you want a single platform to organize references, read and annotate PDFs, establish a shared library with colleagues, and import citations into Microsoft Word. Mendeley’s free plan is ideal for users who need basic functionality and limited storage. Although it doesn’t integrate with Google Docs, you can still use Mendeley to find and organize references and export a bibliography to add to your document.

Mendeley lets you access your library from anywhere: Windows, Mac, Linux, and all major browsers.

ZOTERO

Zoterowas launched in 2006 by an independent non-profit organization. Zotero stores your data on your computer, making it a good option if you are concerned about data privacy. However, please note that you will need to share your data with Zotero to use its sync feature. 

Zotero takes time to master. To help both new and more seasoned users, Zotero provides several resources, including a community forum where you can ask questions. Zotero also posts detailed user guides. Additionally, many university libraries have prepared Zotero resource manuals. Often, these resources are posted on public-facing web pages accessible to anyone. 

Zotero offers several compelling reasons to use its software over similar tools like Mendeley, EndNote, and Paperpile. One is that other software programs are built on open-source code created by the Zotero community. Additionally, Zotero receives frequent updates, unlike other reference managers such as Mendeley.

Select Zotero features include:

• It’s free and open source

• Allows you to save data from websites, journal articles, newspapers, and more, including retrieving publication data for PDFs

• Offers word processor integration with Word, LibreOffice, and Google Docs to manage citations and bibliographies while you write

• Has a built-in PDF reader that lets you mark up PDFs and extract cited quotations and comments directly into notes or word processor documents

• Enables you to collaborate with others to build a bibliography

• Will automatically redirect you through your institution’s proxy so that you can access a PDF that is behind a publisher’s paywall

If you don’t want to create an account with Zotero or only need a simple bibliography, you can use ZoteroBib, Zotero’s free web-based tool for creating bibliographies.

Zotero’s desktop version is free to use. However, you will need a paid account to use the sync feature and access more than 300 MB of storage. 

Who is Zotero for? Zotero is a good choice for someone who wants full control over their references. Unlike Mendeley and Paperpile, Zotero lets users keep their data private by using the desktop version. Zotero is widely used in academia, so it is a good fit for students and faculty. Others may prefer Zotero because it receives frequent updates, is open-source, and is a product of a nonprofit organization. Last but not least, Zotero is feature-packed, so it’s also a good option if you want to go with a reference manager that offers high functionality and will keep up with your evolving needs as a writer and researcher.

Zotero works with Mac, Windows, Linux, and iOS. Because it runs on your computer, you must install Zotero on each computer you want to sync with your online account. 

PAPERPILE

Paperpile came out in 2012. It was developed by three computational biologists while they were at the European Bioinformatics Institute and MIT. We discovered Paperpile last year while working on a proposal for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in collaboration with academics from several U.S. universities. Not all proposal team members could use Microsoft Teams, which we were planning to use as the workspace for the proposal. As a result, we switched to Google Drive and used Google Docs to develop the proposal. After finalizing the proposal, we converted it to Word for editing before submitting it as a PDF. As the draft developed, we initially chose Zotero as our reference manager because several team members already used it and it offers Google Docs integration. When we couldn’t get the Zotero extension to work, we looked for another option. That’s when we found Paperpile. Paperpile worked perfectly for finding and managing references and inserting citations into Google Docs. It can also be used with MS Word, so we could use it for all phases of our proposal’s development. In addition to adding citations to MS Word or Google Docs, Paperpile also integrates with Google Scholar, making it easy to find and import references into your reference library (you can also import data from PubMed and other publisher sites). At $36/year for personal or academic use or $120/year for business use, Paperpile is very affordable. While it doesn’t have a free tier, it does offer a 30-day free trial.

Select Paperpile features

• Uses the Google ecosystem 

  • Collect references using the Chrome extension

  • Organize your PDFs in Google Drive

  • Cite references in Google Docs 

  • Import data directly from Google Scholar

• Has a smart, intuitive interface

  • Organize papers with folders, labels, and stars

  • Look up papers online or search your library (Paperpile automatically imports the PDFs of the references you’ve added to your library)

  • Fix references with incomplete data and clean up duplicates

• Offers the ability to share and collaborate with anyone (even those without a Paperpile account)

  • Cite references in MS Word 

  • Share copies of papers with colleagues 

  • Annotate PDFs 

Paperpile differs from other reference managers in that it doesn’t offer a direct sync through its service. Instead, if you want to sync your research and access it across multiple devices, Paperpile uses your Google Drive account. If you currently use Google Drive for Cloud storage and have adequate space in your account, Paperpile may be ideal. If you don’t want to use Google Drive as your storage hub, or your account doesn't have enough space to store the data (this might be unusual, but it can be an issue for some), Paperpile won’t be a good fit. Another connection to Google is that Paperpile uses your Google login, so you don’t need to create a new username or password when setting up your account.

Who is Paperpile for? Paperpile is an obvious choice for those who use Google Docs for most of their writing. It’s also good for group efforts that require an easily accessible, Cloud-based workspace. While not everyone has a Microsoft 365, Dropbox, or Box account—all popular options for sharing files—most people do have Google accounts, making Paperpile a potentially faster, easier way to manage and share data for a collaborative writing effort. Paperpile also makes it easy to access your research. If you download PDFs through Paperpile and choose to sync your Paperpile account with Google Drive, you can access your research directly through Google Drive without having to log into Paperpile first. Lastly, Paperpile has an intuitive interface, making it a good choice for those who want to jump in and use a reference manager without extensive training. Finally, another advantage of Paperpile is that it doesn’t require those collaborating with you to have a Paperpile account.  

Paperpile is a web-based tool. It is fully supported on Chrome for macOS, Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS, and has been known to work with Microsoft Edge and the open-source Chromium browser. It works with Google Docs, MS Word, iOS, and Android.

WHICH REFERENCE MANAGER IS THE BEST?

All three reference managers are great options. Which reference manager is best for you depends on factors such as how much data you need to store, whether you’ll be working with others, and whether you need a specific feature, such as compatibility with Google Docs. Mendeley is a well-rounded tool that works in most contexts, including proposals. However, Mendeley doesn’t have a Google Docs integration. In Google Docs, Paperpile is the leader. Paperpile has a well-designed interface, is one of the easiest reference managers to use, and is perfect for those working predominantly in Google’s ecosystem. If you work with people who use EndNote and want a free (or less expensive) option that has a similar look and feel, either Mendeley or Zotero would be suitable.

Although feature-rich, popular, and free—and developed by a nonprofit organization sensitive to data privacy issues—Zotero is the reference manager least suited for occasional users, including most proposal writers. This is because Zotero takes time to learn, and its interface is less intuitive than those of Mendeley or Paperpile. However, it is a robust reference manager, and its free plan will meet most proposal writers' needs. If you frequently collaborate with university students or faculty, you should be familiar with Zotero and understand how it works. If you work in an academic setting, we recommend creating a Zotero account and completing a few tutorials to ensure you’re ready to use it.

SUMMARY

Reference managers serve several functions. They can act as search engines to find relevant journal articles, books, and web-based content; serve as PDF readers; and store and organize your references and import citations into your documents. 

There are many reference managers to choose from besides those profiled in this post. The key to finding one that will work for you is knowing the context where you will be using it the most (e.g., research papers vs. proposals, if proposals, which types of funders), and whether you will be collaborating with anyone. You’ll also want to review the list of citation styles each reference manager supports before you make your decision. This is particularly important if the documents you tend to work on require a citation style other than mainstream ones like the American Psychological Association or the Chicago Manual of Style. 

If you want to use Google Docs, Paperpile is ideal. If you wish to annotate PDFs and import web-based content such as blog posts into your library, Mendeley, Zotero, or Paperpile will all work. If you are working collaboratively on a document, ideally, everyone on the team should use the same reference manager, so you may also want to consider your colleagues’ preferred tool. In an academic setting, you should be prepared to use Zotero, which is widely used by faculty and students.

Workarounds are available if writing team members prefer different reference managers. If team members can’t agree on which tool to use for a particular research project or proposal, one solution is to periodically import project-related references from other reference managers into the tool preferred by the lead writer (or editor). If cost is a significant issue for you and your colleagues, several reference managers offer free plans, including EndNote, Mendeley, and Zotero.

Lastly, keep in mind that regardless of which reference manager you choose, you are not limited to using just one, and you don’t have to stick with your first choice. You can use multiple reference managers to see which one you prefer, or choose one and switch later. Although it can be a hassle with large datasets, all the reference managers we’ve reviewed let you export your data, which you can then import into a new tool.  

Additional information:

This post covers only a few of the reference managers on the market. Other reference managers include Citationsy as well as one offered by SciSpace (formerly Typeset). To see a comparison of reference managers, including the ones profiled in this post, check out this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software.

April 30, 2023

We’ve written several posts over the years about how to write grants. We’ve also written about the pros and cons of being a grant writer. But one thing we haven’t covered is how to become a grant writer. We’ll cover this topic now and outline three paths.

THREE COMMON PATHS TO BECOMING A GRANT WRITER

1. Work on a Project for a Nonprofit or Academic Institution

By far, the most common way people learn to write grant proposals is by working for a program at a nonprofit or academic institution that is wholly or partially dependent on grant funding for its operations. If you want a single, surefire way to move into grant writing, it’s this one. This path doesn’t always require strong writing skills (although you’ll need them eventually) or subject-matter expertise. You can start on this path fresh out of college, after grad school, or even in retirement.

At nonprofits, most job descriptions reference grants. For example, a job description for a project staff member might say, “support grant writing as needed,” or something similar. For more senior-level jobs, the job description might list “lead the development and submission of grant applications to relevant foundations, government agencies, and corporations in collaboration with business development and executive staff.”

At a university, faculty are always seeking grant funding. If you have a job supporting a department or a project at a university, there’s a good chance you’ll become involved in preparing or supporting faculty members’ grant applications.

With the scenarios above, your core job responsibilities will have nothing to do with grant writing or seeking grant funding. Most likely, your role will involve implementing grant-funded activities. However, because a typical grant has a project period of five years or less, finding and applying for grant funding is an ongoing job for any organization that relies on grant funding. Initially, your role in a grant effort may be small, including tasks such as reformatting CVs or collecting background information. Eventually, you could graduate to writing sections of proposals, usually starting with the less technical ones, such as personnel, management, and past performance. As your skills and subject-matter knowledge increase, you’ll be assigned more technical aspects, such as those covering project activities, milestones, and project monitoring and evaluation. As you work on various proposals, you’ll gain exposure to different types of grant applications and proposal sections, becoming familiar with the terminology, common guidelines, and typical proposal development stages.

The most common path to becoming a grant writer is to be exposed to grant writing through work as a project staff member in an academic department or nonprofit.

Gaining grant writing and proposal development experience by working for a nonprofit is the most common and arguably the best way to segue into full-time grant writing. Note that if you think you’ll eventually want to transition to working as a grant writer, it’s essential to keep a list of all the proposals you’ve ever worked on, including the name of the funder, the type of project, the value of the award, what your contribution was, and the proposal’s outcome (funded or rejected). Many nonprofits will ask for such lists from candidates and, for better or worse, will judge your work and skill level based on how many proposals have been funded.

2. Consult on Proposals as a Subject-Matter Expert

Another common path to becoming a grant writer is through subject-matter expertise. The vast majority of grants are for projects rather than for core funding (the latter covers basic operating expenses). Projects are time-limited endeavors with defined goals and objectives, often focused on a specialized area.

While many nonprofits have staff with expertise in their key areas of service or research, not all do. And even if an organization employs subject-matter experts, schedule challenges and workload issues may make it difficult to involve in-house experts in every proposal. Even university departments—which have access to many subject-matter experts—may struggle to find faculty who can set aside other work to write grant proposals. For both nonprofits and university departments, the way to fill this expertise gap is to hire subject-matter experts (SMEs).

SMEs can help develop a proposal in several ways. For some proposals, an organization might need an SME with expertise in a specific technical area or geographic location. Another proposal effort might require someone with broad experience in areas such as forestry, agriculture, education, or public health who can help the organization’s staff translate technical concepts into more proposal-friendly language. Lastly, organizations may hire a consultant when applying to an unfamiliar funder or funding mechanism.

Do you have subject-matter expertise but don’t like to write? You can still offer your services as a grant writer. Many subject-matter experts working as consultants often write very little of the proposal’s content. Instead, they mainly serve as reviewers, providing feedback on proposal drafts.

When an organization hires an SME to assist with a grant proposal, it wants someone with experience working on proposals and, ideally, with the funder in question. Preferably, the expert will also have strong writing skills. However, for a technical expert with a specialized background (e.g., engineering, medicine, or program evaluation), the organization will scrutinize the candidate's technical knowledge most closely when making a hiring decision. Writing skills will be of interest but not formally evaluated, and potential consultants may not be asked for a writing sample. However, if the organization seeks someone with experience with a specific funder, it may request that applicants provide a copy of a successful proposal submitted to that funder.

3. Leverage Your Skills as a Professional Writer

A third path to becoming a grant writer is open to professional writers.

If you work as a writer, grant writing may seem like a natural application of your skills. Although writers can find work as grant writers based on the premise that “writing is writing,” it’s not as easy as one would think for a professional writer to get a job as a proposal writer. Strong writing skills are advantageous and will make it easier to establish a career as a grant writer. However, it isn’t straightforward to move from another form of writing, such as copywriting, to grant writing.

Proposal writing requires a different approach than writing marketing copy, a blog post, a research paper, or a novel. If you are a professional writer and wish to move into grant writing, you must demonstrate that you can collate input from others, follow application instructions, and work as a member of a proposal team to prepare a responsive, compliant proposal. Unlike many other forms of writing, writing grant proposals is not a solo activity. Collaboration is critical.

Grant writers must be able to interpret the proposal guidelines and understand the funder’s interests and the proposed project’s objectives. When choosing between someone who writes exceptionally well but lacks experience with grant proposals and someone who writes moderately well but has experience writing or managing grant proposals, most nonprofits will prioritize grant and nonprofit experience over writing skills. Because grant funding is so critical to its existence, it can be difficult for a nonprofit to take a chance on someone who has not worked on a grant proposal team before, has limited knowledge of the nonprofit’s work, and lacks familiarity with the various types of funders and standard funding mechanisms. However, the ability to write well under pressure is unquestionably a valued skill in the proposal world, so once a writer has some proposal experience, they can find themselves in high demand.

WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR GRANT WRITING SKILLS

If you want to transition to working full-time as a grant writer or add grant writing to your portfolio of offerings, what specific steps can you take? There are a couple of things you can do.

Volunteer as a grant writer. Aspiring grant writers are often told to volunteer as grant writers to gain experience. We’ve also offered this advice because, in theory, volunteering could be a way to gain experience. In practice, we’ve never worked at an organization that has either recruited (or allowed) volunteer grant writers, or met anyone who got their start as a grant writer by volunteering. These observations have led us to believe that, among the various ways to gain experience as a grant writer, volunteering may be the least effective.

Two reasons why organizations may shy away from using volunteer grant writers are that (1) volunteers are harder to hold accountable than paid staff, so if you need something done that could make or break the organization’s finances, a paid staff member is a safer bet; and (2) grant proposals contain confidential information, and an organization may hesitate to share confidential information with a volunteer.

If you want to gain experience as a grant writer by volunteering for a nonprofit, we recommend avoiding large nonprofits with a dedicated business development unit and instead approaching small, community-based nonprofits without a grant writer on staff. Although community nonprofits might be good for finding volunteer opportunities, the downside of volunteering at a small nonprofit is that there may be no one on staff who can offer you coaching or mentoring on how to write a grant.

Take a grant writing course. Taking a course on grant writing can help build your skills as a grant writer and introduce you to the world of grant seeking.

Grant writing courses are offered through many outlets. You can find them at community colleges, continuing education programs, and online course platforms, so you should have no difficulty finding options if you search for “grant writing course” plus “online” or the name of the city where you live.

As with courses on any topic, grant writing courses vary considerably in length, price, and quality. When choosing a course, you’ll want to consider these factors, as well as the type of grant and the recipient organization the course focuses on (e.g., a small foundation grant vs. a multimillion-dollar federal grant, or a community-based organization vs. a large international NGO). A course designed to help you write proposals for small family foundations will not be a good choice if you intend to market your skills to large nonprofits that operate nationally or internationally and rely on government grants. Taking it a step further, if you know you want to focus on grants from a single government source (or type of foundation), you should find a course targeting that funder. For example, for those interested in U.S. government funding, you can often find grant writing seminars focusing on a single federal agency. Sometimes these courses are offered by the agency itself.

If you are an SME and want to apply your technical knowledge to grant writing, it’s worth trying to learn who the dominant funder is in your field and whether any grant writing courses focus on that funder. If the funder is a well-known federal agency, such as the U.S.-based National Science Foundation, or a multilateral agency, such as the World Health Organization, you should be able to find a specialized course. Courses that focus on a single funder provide targeted information on how to interpret application guidelines, eligibility requirements, and the funder’s review and scoring process. Additionally, many funder-specific courses will include templates for standard proposal sections.

One cautionary note. While a good course will help you build your skills, completing a course and listing it on your resume will not be enough to land a grant-writing job. Grant writing courses must be combined with opportunities to gain practical, hands-on experience.

USING EXISTING SKILLS TO TRANSITION INTO PROPOSAL WRITING

Nonprofit or project staff. For those already working in the nonprofit sector, finding opportunities to work on grant proposals should be straightforward, as nonprofits continually seek funding and proposal teams are often understaffed. Initially, you may be asked to shadow a proposal or two, but relatively soon, you should have opportunities to contribute directly to a proposal effort. Once you’ve worked on several proposals and your level of participation increases, you can market your skills and experience to other organizations or use them in a new role at your existing organization. For current nonprofit employees, your knowledge of the organization will make it easier to contribute to proposals and take on more writing responsibilities.

Subject-matter experts. For subject-matter experts, your professional network may help you connect with nonprofits needing assistance with proposals related to your expertise. In a consultant role, you might be tasked to review a proposal to confirm its technical accuracy or asked to write a section of the proposal narrative, such as the background section (also referred to as the context or problem statement, which provides the background on a given challenge and previous attempts to solve it). After working on a few proposals as a contributor or reviewer, you can play a larger role in the proposal development process. This could include participating in the development of the proposal’s strategy or approach. You could also specialize in a single funder, which would allow you to offer future clients deeper insight into what the funder is looking for in proposals. Subject-matter experts don’t always have a lot of writing responsibilities. If you want to be a lead writer, you’ll need to let potential clients know your expectations in this regard.

Professional writers. For professional writers, the challenge is to demonstrate to nonprofits how your experience writing other types of content positions you to be a successful grant writer. To help make your case, you should mention any experience you’ve had working with nonprofits or in the nonprofit sector. Your experience could relate to a service or research area that a nonprofit focuses on. It does not necessarily have to be in fundraising or grant seeking. For example, if you have a background in psychology and have studied domestic violence or written about it, this would be something to highlight if you want to work at a domestic violence shelter as a grant writer.

For freelance and other professional writers who wish to transition to grant writing, we suggest exploring other writing services you can offer nonprofits to build relationships. You could approach a nonprofit to see if it could use your writing skills for its newsletter, brochures, blog, or other forms of public content. After a nonprofit has engaged you as a volunteer or paid consultant to write content for public distribution, you could introduce the idea of helping them with grant proposals and project reports. If the nonprofit has gotten to know you and likes your work, it may be open to having you work on a few grants on a contractual basis. However, perhaps the easiest way to transition into grant writing is to start by editing proposals. After editing a few, you will quickly learn their flow, typical structure, and content. Proposal editing will also help you learn about the missions and capabilities of individual nonprofits, project areas, and funders' interests. Additionally, many nonprofits that might hesitate to hire a consultant grant writer may be willing to pay for occasional proposal-editing services, which could eventually expand into grant writing.

If you lack grant writing experience, you can gain valuable exposure to the grant process by serving initially as a proposal editor.

SUMMARY

Working as a staff member on a grant-funded project or with a grant-funded organization is the most common way to learn how to write grants. If you already work for a nonprofit, you may be able to segue into a grant writing role with your current employer. Or, you could gain experience by supporting proposals where you currently work and leveraging that experience to secure a full-time grant writing position at another organization. To increase your marketability, you should seek exposure to as many funders and proposal types as possible.

For subject-matter experts and professional writers, it may take time to build the skills and connections needed to secure grant writing work. With subject-matter experts, writing skills may not be as important as demonstrating technical competence and showing an ability to understand project goals and funders’ programmatic interests. 

Professional writers must be prepared to show their overall writing ability, capacity to work as a proposal team member, and ability to interpret a funder’s requirements. For professional writers, it may help to start by working with nonprofits on other (non-proposal-related) writing tasks. After establishing a relationship with the nonprofit and mastering aspects of proposal development and grant-seeking, an opportunity may appear to move into grant writing.

April 03, 2023

Grant proposals have at least two parts: the project narrative and the budget (aka cost proposal). If you work for a large nonprofit, different people may be assigned to the narrative and cost proposal, with the two groups meeting periodically throughout the proposal process to ensure the sections stay in sync. At a small nonprofit, there may not be a division of responsibilities between the cost and narrative proposals, leaving the project lead (or the grant writer) to both write the proposal narrative and prepare the budget. 

Assigning a single person as the lead for the entire proposal is not necessarily a bad thing. It can help ensure that the budget reflects the latest decisions regarding the project’s activities. However, if you’ve never prepared or managed a project budget, the budget piece can be intimidating. To help new grant writers, below is a list of several strategies you can employ to make the budgeting process easier and more accurate.

HOW TO PREPARE A PROJECT BUDGET FOR A GRANT PROPOSAL

1. Create a template 

The first step in the budgeting process is to set up your budget template. Unless the proposal requires a very simple budget that must be embedded into the narrative as a small table, it works best to develop the budget in Excel or a similar spreadsheet tool, such as Google Sheets. A spreadsheet will give you access to formulas, making the budgeting process faster and usually more accurate.

In the funding opportunity announcement, the funder will either include a budget template or describe the budget your proposal should include, including any required line items. If the funder has not provided a template, you can use your organization’s standard budget template, modifying it as needed to reflect the proposal’s requirements. If your organization does not have a template, you can find a basic one by searching the template libraries linked to Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. You can also do a Google search for budget templates and often find something that will work, though you’ll want to check that it is from a trusted source before downloading the file. Because of concerns about malicious software, it’s safest to stick to templates from Microsoft, Google, or downloaded from a government agency or well-known foundation. 

Regardless of where the template comes from, even if it is included with the solicitation, you’ll want to check it against the proposal’s requirements before entering any data. If the template requires changes to its formulas or other features, you can find tutorials on YouTube from Microsoft and Google, as well as on LinkedIn Learning and other course platforms.

2. Research anticipated costs

Proposal budgets cannot be finalized until the project design is far enough along to provide a clear picture of what should be included. For most proposals, this means that until the first draft of the proposal narrative is ready, the person leading the budget must stick to preliminary tasks, such as building the budget template. While the proposal narrative is being drafted, it’s also possible to begin researching the costs of expected budget items. For example, regardless of the project details, you may already know which staff members will be involved in implementing it. While the project details are being finalized, you can collect the salary information for the proposed project staff and confirm how their benefits should be calculated and included in the personnel costs. If you know the project will require the help of consultants, you can research the average rate for consultants who possess the type and degree of experience you will need. Or, if you have already identified a consultant, you can use this preparatory period to confirm their rate and complete the consultant agreement.

After the first draft of the narrative is complete, a clearer picture of what needs to be budgeted will emerge. For each line item, you’ll need to research its expected cost for the duration of the project period. For some items, such as office supplies, there may not be much seasonal variation; you can look up what an item costs currently and use that same figure for the duration of the budget. However, when it comes to travel expenses or renting meeting space, the costs can vary significantly depending on the time of year. To accommodate this, you’ll need to know roughly when each project activity will occur so the budget can reflect these rate fluctuations. For example, if three community meetings will take place during the project, you want to know when each will be held to prepare the most accurate budget. You’ll also need to know when activities will occur for the project timeline, so this level of planning helps strengthen your proposal on multiple levels.

One of the biggest problems we’ve seen with budgeting newbies is that they fail to research the actual costs of line items. Instead, they use “guesstimates”—or numbers that seem reasonable—to produce a budget that reaches a desired amount. Sometimes this approach works okay, and the budgeted costs will be largely accurate. At other times, line items may be significantly underbudgeted, delaying project implementation. While some funders will provide additional funding or allow project activities to be scaled back to help a grantee that has significantly misjudged costs, many funders will be unwilling to do so.

When an organization does not have enough grant money to cover a project’s activities, it must try to honor the terms of the grant agreement by finding supplemental funding to cover costs and complete the project. Many funding gaps are ultimately filled by unrestricted funds generated through traditional fundraising activities (e.g., cash gifts from individuals) or other cash reserves.

Under-budgeting is one risk associated with submitting an inaccurate budget. Another risk of using “guesstimates”—or essentially, made-up figures for your budget—is that if a funder is interested in funding your project but requests additional justification of certain costs, you cannot provide that information readily. To be prepared for a funder’s questions about your project budget, you should not only do your research but also save it for future reference. For example, if your project includes air travel, you should research the average cost of flights that you expect project staff to take during the project (i.e., from place A to place B at X time of year) and save those results so you can provide a copy to the funder to back up your figures if requested to do so. 

3. Consider the project phases when you prepare your budget

If you are new to preparing a project budget, you might think the hardest part is budgeting for year 1, and that once you have year 1 done, you can simply duplicate the figures for the subsequent project years. A variation of this approach is to take whatever the funder lists as the maximum award amount and divide it by the number of years to get annual budget figures. Each approach produces unrealistic, identical budgets for each budget period (typically 12 months). In number 5 below, we address the issue of asking for the maximum award and why that’s not always the best approach. Regarding the first scenario—developing the budget for year 1 and duplicating it for subsequent years—this doesn’t work because project activities and their associated costs invariably fluctuate from year to year.

For general support grants, it can sometimes work to propose the same annual budget amount for multiple years. This is because general support grants are usually intended to contribute to an organization’s general operating costs but not cover them in full. The general support grant would be (or should be) one of several sources of unrestricted funding that an organization could use to cover expenses such as rent, office equipment, and salaries and benefits for administrative staff. However, even for general operating costs, requesting a flat amount per year is not ideal. Because an organization’s annual costs are likely to increase from year to year, requesting a flat amount (e.g., 20K/year for 3 years) means that the grant amount will likely represent a smaller percentage of the organization’s overall operating budget with each passing year, leaving a bigger gap to fill with other funding sources. 

A better way to budget for general operating costs or a project budget is to try to calculate as precisely as possible how much you’ll need in a given period based on what is projected to happen in that year. 

For a project-based grant, you will have start-up costs in year 1 that will not need to be repeated in the following years. There will also be project close-out tasks that will only occur in the project’s final year. Additionally, your project will consist of multiple activities, including some that will require resources for just a few months of a single year. For example, you might have a big meeting scheduled in year 2. As a result, year 2 will look different than the other project periods that do not include a large meeting. You may need to hire someone at the beginning of year 2 to manage the meeting, which will increase your personnel costs that year. Additionally, if you are renting space and hiring a caterer, those expenses will have to be budgeted for year 2. 

Thinking about your grants by budget period matters because, for multi-year grants, funders typically do not provide all the funding at the start of the grant. You will receive each payment only after the funder has approved any required project reports from the previous budget period.

4. Budget for salary adjustments and other annual increases 

As noted above, project costs fluctuate from year to year; personnel costs almost always increase over time. Most organizations make annual adjustments to salaries and benefits. Budgets that do not factor in these increases may have to cover the shortfalls with unrestricted funds, which, for most organizations, are in limited supply. Because personnel costs are often the single largest expense for any project, miscalculations in this area can significantly affect the entire budget. In addition to personnel, annual increases for core expenses should also be factored in, such as for insurance, internet service, and office security.

While we’re on the subject of personnel, another good practice is to budget for the level of expertise you will actually need to implement the project, even if that makes the budget tighter than you would like.

To make the budget go further, sometimes organizations will either (a) budget a limited time on the project for senior personnel to reduce personnel costs, or (b) budget salaries too low to attract the type of candidates needed to fill particular positions. It’s not unusual for funders to flag salaries they consider too low, sometimes making an award contingent on their adjustment to a more competitive level. But funders may not flag the salary issue, instead holding the grantee to the budget they set. When this happens, the grantee may not be able to recruit the level of expertise required to successfully implement the project. When insufficient time is budgeted for senior staff, the project may lack adequate oversight, resulting in negative consequences, such as missed deadlines.

5. Create a budget for the project, not the award ceiling

Many organizations adopt the practice of always requesting the maximum grant amount. If the funder says it will provide 3 grants of up to $25K each, the organization will apply for $24,999. If the award ceiling is $150K, the organization will submit a budget of $149,999. It just makes sense, right? It does if you’ve prepared a detailed, realistic budget and found that the project will cost $149,999. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense because you’re backing into the budget instead of building it based on expected, reasonable costs. 

The problem with budgeting to the award ceiling may not be obvious at the proposal stage. The problems can appear later, when it’s time to implement the project and report on expenditures. At the reporting stage, it can be challenging because the actual project costs may differ significantly from the budget for some or all line items. When project spending appears to be way off, funders will want an explanation for the under- or overspending. A funder may also request that the grantee provide a revised budget that better approximates the project’s anticipated costs. 

A solution funders sometimes employ when an organization has underspent project funds is to give a no-cost extension. No-cost extensions extend the performance period, allowing the organization additional time to spend the money already received, complete any remaining activities from the original scope of work, and sometimes conduct supplemental activities.

While renegotiating a project’s budget with a funder is not uncommon, it’s best to avoid the potential of a significant mismatch between the proposed budget and reported expenditures. For more accurate budgeting and stronger projects, it generally works best to think about the project’s design first, letting the activities guide the budgeting process rather than starting with a dollar figure.

Will you need to adjust the activities to fit the budget? Yes, activities may need to be dropped, scaled back, or shifted to different project periods to fit within budget caps. That’s part of the normal back-and-forth between the proposal narrative and the budgeting process. What isn’t a best practice is to start the proposal process by saying, “The funder provides grants up to $100K. Let’s find things to do to get to that amount.” However, that said, opinions differ on the appropriateness of budgeting to the award ceiling. For many organizations, the strategy works because it is familiar. Regardless, creating a budget that accurately reflects the project's cost is the most straightforward and defensible approach.

To summarize, there are three steps to accurate budgeting, including (1) designing the project, (2) identifying everything necessary to implement the project, and (3) pricing out each piece to determine the total budget figure. If you’ve done your budget correctly and find that your final budget amount is too high and eclipses the award ceiling, you can look back at how you derived each line item and make calculated, intentional adjustments to ensure that—even with the reductions—you can still implement the project. In contrast, if you’ve created your budget using guesstimates, you can never be sure that the budget (the total budget or the amounts of individual line items) will be enough.

While any budget is somewhat of a guess because projects can face unexpected events and higher-than-predicted costs, there is a difference between educated guesses and fiction. If you have padded every line item to reach a target figure, your budget will be tilting more toward fiction than fact. The same is true if you start with the award ceiling and randomly assign numbers to line items based on what feels reasonable. 

There are real repercussions from poor budgeting. If your budget is not based on actual or reasonable projected costs, you could run into problems when reporting on expenditures. Additionally, if the funder discovers that you’ve significantly padded your budget, it could harm your relationship with them.

6. Prepare a budget justification in tandem with the budget

As you build the budget, keep in mind that you will need to justify each cost in the accompanying budget justification.

The level of detail required in the justification varies by grant opportunity. Some funders ask for a few sentences to describe the purpose of each line item, while others, such as the U.S. government, require a detailed budget justification that explains each line item's purpose and how costs were calculated. The budget justification, the budget, and the proposal narrative all must align. You don’t want an activity described in the narrative that doesn’t appear in the budget, and you don’t want a line item in the budget that isn’t justified.

To ensure that your budget and budget justification are comprehensive, it helps to work on the budget justification simultaneously with the budget. Sometimes the proposal lead (the person overseeing the proposal process) will initially focus 100% on the proposal narrative, start the budget process only after the narrative is done, and save the budget justification for last. There’s nothing wrong with this approach per se. However, if you wait to start the budget, you may discover late in the proposal process that you can’t afford to do some of the activities you’ve described in the proposal narrative. To avoid surprises, we suggest starting the budget when the first draft of the narrative is ready, and there’s a general idea of the project’s activities. 

Preparing the budget justification as the last step in the proposal process is a common practice. If the budget justification is simple, this isn’t a problem. However, if the budget justification must be detailed and show the calculations used to determine each cost, it is helpful to work on both the budget and the justification simultaneously. Doing so will help you remember to document your research and give you more time to compare the justification against the proposal to ensure they align. Working on the justification early in the process can also help in other ways, depending on the solicitation requirements. If your proposal narrative exceeds the page limits, some content from the narrative’s management and staffing section can sometimes be shifted to the budget justification. If the budget justification is already underway, you’re in a better position to determine if you have enough room within the justification’s page limits to make this change. 

7. Invite several people to review the budget

It’s a good practice to have at least one person external to the proposal team evaluate the proposal against the budget to ensure they align. If your organization’s finance staff has not been directly involved in developing the budget, it’s important to have someone from the finance department review it. Finance staff may spend most of their time managing departmental budgets and have less experience with proposal budgets and funder requirements. To help them with their review, it’s a good idea to provide a bulleted list of the budget requirements found in the solicitation, highlighting any specific questions you may have. Finance staff may not take the time to read the narrative proposal, so you will also want to give them a summary of the proposal to help them evaluate whether the budget and budget justification are comprehensive and accurate.

In addition to the finance team, it’s helpful to have someone from the organization’s programs side review the budget (again, someone not involved with the proposal). Often, these individuals are better than the finance staff at comparing the proposal narrative and the budget to ensure they match. Experienced project leads are also well-positioned to see if the budget includes everything it should, something that’s difficult to do without direct experience managing projects.

To ensure there is enough time to make any necessary budget changes, schedule budget reviews at different points during the proposal process, with a final review about a week before the proposal is due. For more information about how to schedule a proposal process, please see our posts The 6-Week Proposal Process and Follow This Plan and You'll Never Miss a Proposal Deadline. 

8. Budget for all possible outcomes: ideal, good, and bare minimum

The final bit of budgeting advice is more for your reference than for inclusion in the proposal. If you are preparing a proposal where there the potential award size has not been given, you may want to create more than one budget: one for the best-case scenario, where you get the full amount that you are requesting (this will be the budget included with the proposal); a middle-ground budget, which provides a decent amount but less than the ideal; and a worst-case scenario, which is the lowest you can go and still conduct the proposed activities.

We’ve seen some funders occasionally ask for projections like this to be included in the proposal. Mainly, though, this activity is for the organization’s benefit, not the funder’s. Having an idea of what you could accomplish based on the size of the grant is valuable information to have on hand if the award amount is lower than you hoped, allowing you to respond quickly to the funder with a revised budget and scope of work. Doing this type of planning will also make it clearer what the minimum award size must be if you are to do the work and avoid financial risk.

Summary

Project budgeting can be challenging because projects rarely roll out exactly as planned. However, with adequate research and planning, you can minimize some of the challenges that can arise, particularly during the project’s implementation period. When preparing a project budget for a grant proposal, a good approach is to be as thorough as possible in identifying expected costs associated with conducting the proposed activities, including accounting for annual cost adjustments.

For those working on the pre-award side, such as grant writers, it can be tempting to develop a budget that reaches the maximum award amount by using back-of-the-envelope estimates for each line item. The temptation stems from the fact that, on the pre-award side, your focus is on winning the grant—the larger, the better. What happens post-award will be resolved by others. Sometimes this less-rigorous budgeting approach works out. Other times, it doesn’t, and those on the post-award side (the project and finance staff) have to address the issues and negotiate a resolution with the funder, whether that’s a plea for additional funding or a no-cost extension. Either way, a poorly developed budget affects the project’s implementation. The best grant proposal budgets strike a balance between decisions on the pre-award side designed to win the grant and an awareness of the budget’s influence on the post-award phase.

We hope the suggestions above will help you create budgets that serve you well throughout the project lifecycle. If you have budget tips from your own experience, please share them in the comments below!

March 01, 2023

If you are wondering if it is a viable strategy to write one proposal and submit it as-is to multiple funders, the basic answer is no, it’s not advisable. There are some limited exceptions, which we get into later, but that’s the general rule.

Writing a proposal and sharing it with multiple donors via email rarely leads to success for several reasons.

First, most funders do not accept unsolicited proposals, which are proposals submitted to a funder essentially at random and not in response to a specific request for proposals (RFPs). If an organization emails the same project description and request for support to several funders at once as part of a mass mailing, these would all be unsolicited submissions. Even if a funder has active RFPs, a submission would still be regarded as unsolicited if the proposal is for a program that is not accepting proposals. For example, if a foundation funds climate change and health education but accepts proposals only for its climate change program, an organization that submits a proposal requesting funding for its health education program is submitting an unsolicited proposal. 

Second, every funder has different programmatic priorities and goals. If you send the same proposal to several funders without first revising the content to accommodate each funder’s particular interests, your proposal is unlikely to be successful. Funders fund proposals that help them advance their goals. If your proposal focuses on your organization’s needs and does not show the overlap between what you do and what the funder hopes to achieve, your proposal will probably not spark a funder’s interest.  

A third reason why the “write one proposal and send it everywhere” approach generally doesn’t work is that while some funders accept unsolicited proposals, they fund very few. Some foundations, such as the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, state this explicitly. The Packard Foundation accepts unsolicited proposals but notes that it funds fewer than 1% of them.  As a grant strategy, unless you have a compelling reason to send unsolicited proposals, it’s always better to send proposals in response to a direct invitation from the funder or in response to an open funding opportunity announcement. 

However, there are times when sending the same proposal to several donors can work.

SITUATIONS WHEN IT CAN (MOSTLY) WORK TO SEND THE SAME PROPOSAL TO MULTIPLE FUNDERS

Below are three situations in which it can be effective to send essentially the same proposal to multiple donors. 

Conference support

Few private foundations support conferences. Government agencies are better bets, but even then, the conference topic must overlap with the agency’s interests. However, funders that support conferences often like to see that other funders are also providing support. While you may have to revise your proposal slightly to conform to different funder guidelines, it is possible to submit almost identical requests for conference support to several funders. For conferences, funders are interested in similar information, such as the conference agenda and target audience, the expected number of attendees, the conference location, and whether the conference will be open to the public.

Non-traditional funders

Another example where it may be possible to send the same proposal to multiple funders is when the funders are non-traditional, such as small family foundations that lack a formal application process, or a wealthy individual donor who wants to see a project description but doesn’t care about the request’s format. Corporate donors can also fall into this category. While many large corporations have separate foundations that process grant applications, other companies have informal programs that do not require formal proposals.

Common applications

You can prepare one proposal and submit it to multiple funders when each funder has agreed to accept a common (or standard) application. Funders accepting common applications tend to be smaller private foundations or community foundations. However, even when funders accept a common application, there can be differences in certain requirements, such as how the application must be submitted, so you’ll still need to read each funder’s guidelines carefully. Regardless, common applications are probably as close as you can get to preparing a single application and having it accepted by multiple donors.

SHOULD YOU BOTHER SUBMITTING UNSOLICITED PROPOSALS?

So, should you submit unsolicited proposals? Unsolicited proposals are rarely accepted or funded and are generally not worth submitting.  On the other hand, if you’ve determined that it will take very little time to prepare the funding request and send it to multiple funders, you may decide it’s still worth trying. 

If you do send unsolicited proposals, one cautionary note is that you should be aware of how doing so may affect your and your department's annual performance evaluations.  If you work for an organization that looks closely at proposal win rates and bases salary increases or employment decisions on the percentage of proposals that have been successfully funded, you’ll want to think carefully before submitting unsolicited proposals. Because unsolicited proposals are rarely funded, submitting them frequently will lower your win rate. However, if your organization is encouraging you to submit as many proposals as possible and does not evaluate performance based on win rates, that obviously changes the risk and reduces the negative repercussions of submitting them. 

Regardless of what you decide to do with unsolicited proposals, don’t forget to employ the best grant strategy, which is to cultivate relationships with funders in addition to focusing on open requests for proposals.

February 01, 2023

It isn't easy to edit your own writing. Because you know what you meant to write, your eye will often gloss over misspellings, missing words, and incorrect word choices. Even when you are determined to slow down and read what you’ve written word-for-word, it’s almost impossible to resist skimming some sections. Sometimes you may find yourself skimming inadvertently, and other times it may be by choice when you think you’ve reviewed a passage enough. By choice or by accident, it’s hard to look at something you’ve written with the level of attention required to do a comprehensive edit. For this reason, if at all possible, it’s always best practice to have someone else review what you’ve written to ensure it is clear and has no glaring errors.

However, there are occasions when editing your own writing is unavoidable. For instance, in the context of grant writing, you might work for a small nonprofit and be unable to afford the services of a professional editor. Or maybe you are uncomfortable asking a friend or colleague to read your text. It’s for these moments that we’ve created the following list of tips and tricks.

The list includes some software tools you can use, but most of the tips are free to implement and only require your time.

EIGHT TIPS FOR EDITING YOUR WRITING

1. Take a break. The first tip is to step away from whatever you are working on so you can return to it with fresh eyes. The longer you can step away from the document, the better; even if you have an immediate deadline, a few hours away can help. If you are so time-crunched that you cannot step away from your document for even a few hours, the next best thing to do is to review the document in reverse order, starting with whatever section you finished first and working up to the most recent section you worked on. Even though it may not have been that long since you stopped working on the first section, any gap between the time you last worked on it and the time you conduct your final review is better than nothing and can help you spot errors and awkward phrasing.

2. Print it. The second tip is to conduct your review on a physical copy of the document. While not strictly necessary, it can help to place a ruler underneath each line as you review it. Some people swear that the only way to edit a document effectively is to print a copy and mark it up by hand. We don’t think this is necessarily true, but some people may find that working from a printed copy helps them slow down and do a closer read than they can when looking at it on a computer screen. Because printing your document has both cost and environmental implications, you may want to reserve this option for shorter documents.

3. Read your text out loud. Another way to catch errors and improve flow is to read your document out loud. It is also one of the best ways to help make your writing match your “voice” and sound more natural. If you are working on a longer document, reading the whole thing aloud may not be feasible. However, you can still use this method to improve your writing by using it on a handful of paragraphs or pages that are giving you the most difficulty.

4. Read each line in reverse. All of these strategies have one thing in common, which is that they help you look at your writing in a new light. This next strategy does this by changing how you read: Instead of reading your sentences from beginning to end, you’re going to read them in reverse, from the end to the beginning. Each method we’re outlining works better for some things than others. This method is particularly good for copy editing tasks, such as spotting typos like extra letters or accidentally typing the same word twice in a row. For obvious reasons, it is not the best method to identify problems with flow or readability.

5. Change the spacing. On this theme of changing things up, another way to bring a fresh perspective to your writing is to change the spacing. If whatever you are working on must be submitted as single-spaced text, switching to double-spaced text will give you a new view. Another trick, arguably even more effective, is to switch from a single-column to a two-column format. After you reformat the text into columns, you will invariably discover sentences or paragraphs that suddenly seem far too long, clunky, or tangled. Changing the column width alters the text's experience to such a degree that we strongly suggest formatting your text as columns early in the writing process if the final product will be published in two or more columns.

6. Change the context. If you’ve been working on a document for a very long time, as often happens with grant proposals, you can become so accustomed to seeing different elements like a data table that it’s easy to jump over the table without reviewing its details. Didn’t the data get checked by someone else two weeks ago? Yes, exactly, and that’s the problem! Especially toward the end of working on any document, you want to believe that certain things are done and do not have to be revisited. However, as a document undergoes multiple revisions, the tables and graphics may not be updated to reflect these changes, or they may be placeholders that someone forgot to replace with the final versions. To evaluate tables and other inserts, it can help to copy and paste them onto a blank page. For the review, place the new document next to the main document. This makes it easier to compare the figure or table against the rest of the content to ensure everything is correct, consistent, and complete.

7. Search. Most of us have a few words that trip us up. We might misspell commonly used words (its vs. it’s) or use a homonym instead of the word we intended (e.g., hear vs. here). Additionally, there may be terms of art in the document that we are not overly familiar with and need to review carefully to ensure we have used them correctly. For these types of issues, we find it helpful to keep a running list of potential problem areas as we work on the document. During the editing stage, we will return to this list and search the document for each term, phrase, number, heading, or other issue of concern to ensure that every time it is mentioned, it is correctly and consistently spelled, numbered, and worded. If the document includes a list of abbreviations, we review it to confirm that each abbreviation is defined on first use and used consistently throughout.

8. Use a spell-check and grammar tool. A final suggestion is to use an advanced spell-checker such as Grammarly. Microsoft’s built-in grammar and spellchecker tool has become increasingly robust and is a good option, particularly because it is easy to implement in Microsoft Word. Sometimes, Microsoft Word’s grammar and spell-checker tool is all we use because third-party tools (like Grammarly, PerfectIt, and Lingofy) have limits on how many pages can be reviewed at a time. However, if the document’s length doesn’t rule them out, we will usually scan it with Microsoft Word’s built-in grammar and spell checker and another editing tool. We’ve found Grammarly to be the best of those we’ve tried, so that’s usually the one we use. We rely on Grammarly less as a spellchecker and more to identify sentences that can be written more concisely. One of the challenges of editing your own writing is that, particularly if a sentence is communicating what you want it to, you may not think about ways to say the same thing in fewer words. Grammarly can help flag these areas. While Grammarly is very good, you cannot simply scan your writing with Grammarly and accept every suggested change. It is imperative to review Grammarly’s proposed changes one by one to determine whether they are relevant and correct for the given context.

The idea behind all these tips is to create a little space between you and your writing, allowing you to look at it more objectively. You may not end up using most of the strategies regularly. However, if your writing will be closely evaluated, as in a grant proposal, employing one or more of these suggestions can help ensure that the final draft makes sense, flows well, and is as free of misspellings and typos as possible.

January 01, 2023

Like many of you, we’ve worked on grant proposals that haven't come together easily, and the final products have felt mediocre at best. Despite their weaknesses, sometimes the proposals still get funded, but that’s the exception, not the rule.

Is there a way to avoid the risk of submitting a weak proposal that has little chance of getting funded?

After seeing a few proposal turnarounds in which mediocre proposals have been transformed into much stronger ones, we’ve found three steps that can work wonders. These three steps, while distinct, are interconnected in that they all relate to refining your message at different stages of the proposal process. They can be summarized as (1) making a clear case for the need for your project, (2) getting specific about how the work will be done, and (3) using plain language (e.g., avoiding jargon).

MAKING A CASE FOR YOUR PROJECT

A big part of any grant proposal comes down to making a case that your proposed project will help address one of the funder’s priorities, whether that is solving a problem, providing a service, or advancing a field of study.

If the proposal fails to connect the dots between the funder’s priorities and the proposed project, it can come across as flat because it doesn’t answer the larger question of why this specific project should be funded.

Sometimes organizations attempt to speak to the funder’s interests by inserting lines such as “our proposal directly relates to the funder’s interests in XYZ.” However, this tells the funder that your proposed project aligns with their interests. To be persuasive, you need to show the funder how your project addresses their priorities and broader interests. It’s the funder’s job to determine whether your proposed project fits within their areas of interest and would be a good investment of their money. As the applicant, it is your job to show the funder that your organization understands the central issues, possesses the knowledge and resources to carry out the project, and has the resources to measure the project’s progress and results (i.e., can communicate to the funder the outcome of their investment).

Making a strong case for your proposed project does not mean emphasizing your organization’s need for funding. We see this come up frequently. Telling the funder that you are doing much-needed work and are in dire need of money to realize your goals is not compelling. All organizations need money. What makes a proposal compelling is its ability to demonstrate an understanding of the issues and present a convincing solution. If you view grant proposals primarily as a way to request money to do what your organization has already decided to do, your mindset is more aligned with requesting cash donations from individuals than with submitting a proposal to a formal entity such as a foundation or government agency.

To shift your perspective from “grants are a way to request money to fund what we want to do” to “grants represent a negotiated agreement between the funder and our organization to perform a project of mutual benefit and interest,” it can help to think of the grant process from the funder’s perspective. When a funder awards a grant to your organization, it is investing in your organization, and that investment usually comes with expectations regarding how the money will be used. The funder expects certain tasks to be completed and certain results to be achieved as a result of their investment. So, beyond explaining the issue that needs to be addressed and your organization’s capabilities, you also need to convince the funder why investing in your organization and proposed solution makes sense over other solutions proposed by other applicants.

An oft-repeated phrase in the proposal world is “benefits before features.” When you are trying to make a case for the funder to invest in your organization, it’s useful to keep this mantra in mind. To implement the “benefits before features” approach, you must show the funder the transformative benefits of your program before revealing the details of the solution you are offering. A description of benefits can elicit an emotional response in a way that a list of features rarely does, and that emotional response can encourage the funder to view your proposal favorably.

An example of prioritizing benefits over features is Uber's current fundraising campaign. The campaign is raising money to purchase ambulances for Ukraine. Uber’s donation request does not focus on the specific make and model of ambulances to be purchased with the donations (the features), but instead on stories of how access to transportation in times of need can save lives (the benefits).

GETTING SPECIFIC ABOUT WHAT YOU WILL DO

Almost all proposals that don’t score well have one thing in common: They are too general. It is important to give the funder a broad vision of how your project could be transformative and solve a particular problem. Although you want to give them that vision early in the proposal, after you have provided a broad view of where you are heading and the transformation your project will achieve, you need to tell the funder, in as much detail as possible, how you plan to get there. Additionally, you should be prepared to provide the funder with evidence that your proposed approach will work, in the form of peer-reviewed research or results from past projects conducted by your organization or others.

As an analogy, a proposal is like an itinerary for a trip or cross-country move. Let’s say you have chosen your destination and can articulate why you are excited about this place and the benefits you anticipate experiencing after you arrive, which could be relaxation if it is a vacation or improved career satisfaction if you’re moving for a job. However, the trip may not happen unless you also have a detailed plan that includes your departure timeline, the transportation you’ll use to get there, and a designated place to stay. A proposal has similar requirements. If you don’t communicate a plan for how you will launch and manage your project, funders may be hesitant to invest in your project, regardless of whether they are generally supportive of your project idea. You must convince the funder that you have everything lined up: the transformative vision plus the capacity and capability to implement the project and achieve the promised results.

What’s too general, and what’s enough detail? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. That said, there are a few things you can add to your proposal to ensure the funder has a clear idea of how the project will unfold.

Project Timeline

The first thing we suggest adding to your proposal is a project timeline, even if the funder has not explicitly asked for one. A basic timeline appears below. Although it is less detailed than most project timelines need to be, it should give you an idea of how to create a timeline that reflects the duration of your proposed project and its specific milestones.

Project milestones can include everything from logistical activities like hiring personnel, purchasing equipment, and renting office space to curriculum development, administering training sessions, and conducting an end-of-project evaluation. Unless the funder requires activities to be broken out by month, it may be adequate to depict activities and milestones by quarters.

Example timeline

Logic Model

Another tool that you can use (and is frequently required by funders) is a logic model. A logic model is a way to show the relationship between project resources, proposed activities, outcomes, and the impact you hope to achieve.

A logic model is useful for both the planning phase (which the proposal is part of) and the evaluation phase. A simple logic model might look something like this table:

Structure for a basic logic model

Resources are the assets your organization can contribute to the project, such as personnel, financial resources, or expertise.

The activities section describes the interventions you will undertake, such as holding events, conducting training sessions, or creating a tool. For example, an activity might involve training students to serve as peer counselors.

The results are captured in the following three sections of the table under outputs, outcomes, and impact. Outputs represent the immediate results or products of the intervention, such as “12 students trained per semester to serve as peer counselors.” Often, the output is a concrete deliverable, such as a printed curriculum or a finalized survey instrument.

The outcomes piece represents what happens or is achieved as a result of the intervention. Depending on how detailed you want to be, outcomes can be broken down into short-term, intermediate, or long-term. Outcomes might be phrased as an increase in knowledge in a specific area or a decrease in the occurrence of a specific event. Returning to our peer counseling example, an outcome of a peer counseling program might be an “increased understanding of suicide risk among teens.”

The impact section is meant to address the broader changes resulting from the intervention. For example, a peer counseling program at a school could be projected to lead to a reduction in suicides and fewer mental health crises within the student population. Because impacts are the ultimate result of the intervention, they may not be realized until after the program ends. For this reason, impacts are not always included in a proposal’s logic model. For the proposal stage, it’s most important to share what will occur during the proposed project period, which includes outlining what you are going to do (activities), how you will do it (resources), and the results of the activities (outputs), and the changes or effects that will be produced by the end of the project (outcomes).

Organizational Chart

Organizational charts demonstrate to the funder that you have the right staff roles and personnel in place to implement your project and a vision for how it will be managed. Like project timelines and logic models, funders sometimes require you to include an organizational chart. More frequently, funders will request that you list the project personnel and their qualifications as part of the proposal’s management and staffing section. However, that serves a different purpose than an organizational chart and is best done in a table format. An organizational chart depicts lines of communication and relationships between people and departments, including reporting structures. An organizational chart is also very useful for showing how a partnership will work if the project involves several organizations.

Organizational charts are harder to create than you might expect. You have to think about the relationships between people, departments, and organizations. And you need to devise a structure for depicting those relationships that is clear, easy to grasp, and complements—and does not conflict with—information found elsewhere in the proposal.

PowerPoint is often the design tool of choice for organizational charts because it is widely used, and most people working on a proposal team will be familiar with it. That’s its major advantage. A second advantage is that, as long as you save the original PowerPoint (not just the image), you can go back and revise it as needed. The downside of PowerPoint is that if you use one of the SmartArt hierarchical designs, the result can be an organizational chart that might be too generic and does not accurately reflect how people in your project will actually be managed or work together. So, while you may want to start with a SmartArt design just to avoid a blank page, take the time to tailor it.

For ideas on creating an organizational chart, please see our post Tips for Creating an Organizational Chart for a Grant Proposal.

USING PLAIN LANGUAGE

A final suggestion: if you are faced with a proposal that isn’t reading well or seems lackluster, go through it carefully to eliminate or reduce jargon, platitudes, and clichés. If a proposal is full of empty phrases and jargon, it won’t be as engaging, and the reviewer will have greater difficulty identifying and understanding the core ideas.

Adopting the principles of plain language can help you write more clearly. There are several resources to learn about plain language concepts. One resource we recommend and find very helpful (probably because it is written in plain English!) is the U.S. government website on plain language, available at https://www.plainlanguage.gov/. The general idea behind plain language is that you should use language that is easy to understand and follow. Plain language incorporates techniques such as descriptive headers, bulleted lists, active voice, and short sentences.

When you are immersed in your field of work or study, you also become immersed in terminology that is commonly used in your field. While you may use these terms every day, they may not be widely used outside your field or even, sometimes, consistently used within it. In your everyday communications, this lack of understanding or agreement on terminology may not be a big deal, as you can follow up with your intended audience to provide additional information. With grant proposals, you generally don’t get that second chance. If the funder or the funders’ designated review panel can’t figure out what you are trying to say, there’s a high risk that your proposal will not be funded. Because it can be difficult to spot jargon when it involves language that you use every day, when it’s feasible to do so, it’s recommended to have a professional editor review your proposals. Things you think are self-explanatory may not be to most people. The editor can help spot areas that need additional explanation or places where industry-specific terminology should be replaced with more commonplace language.

Another reason to adopt plain language in your proposal is that whoever evaluates your proposal on behalf of the funder may not be an expert in your area of work. Some funders explicitly caution applicants about this, advising them to write proposal narratives for a panel of well-educated individuals who may have broad knowledge of a given field but are not subject-matter experts.

Additionally, writing clearly and concisely means writing only as much as is necessary to communicate your message effectively. If a proposal has a 10-page limit but you can communicate everything you need in 9, don’t add text just to bulk it out to reach the 10th page. Interpret page limits as the outer limits of how long your proposal can be, not how long your proposal should be. Despite rumors to the contrary that you may have heard, you are not “wasting space” by turning in a proposal that is shorter than the page limits allow. If you’ve prepared a comprehensive, compliant proposal and ended up with a document that falls within the page limits, you’ve used the allotted space efficiently. Reviewers do not want to read more than they have to and appreciate a concise document.

When you apply plain language to your proposal and strip it down to its essentials, you may be surprised to find how little content with true substance remains. Although this can be discouraging, this exercise typically produces a stronger proposal.

CONCLUSION

If you are working on a proposal that is floundering, unclear, or unconvincing, try one or all of these three suggested tips to revive your document: (1) make a clear case for why your project is worth funding, focusing on its benefits and demonstrating a fit with the funder’s stated priorities; (2) be specific about what you are going to do and how you are going to do it, using tools like a timeline, logic models, and organizational charts; and (3) write in plain language that is free of jargon and organized to facilitate comprehension.

Depending on the funding opportunity, you may be required to include a project timeline, a logic model, or an organizational chart. However, even if the funder doesn’t request them, include them anyway. Together, they can make your proposal read better and demonstrate to the funder that you have a concrete idea of what you want to do, how you plan to do it, who will do it, what you’ll achieve, and how your work will be monitored and evaluated for success. Lastly, using plain language in proposals will help ensure that the funder understands your proposed project and can judge it on its merits.

December 03, 2022

If you are preparing a proposal for a U.S. government (USG) agency, center, or institute such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or the National Science Foundation (NSF), you probably already know that it can be a complex, confusing undertaking. And if you haven’t applied for USG funding yet but are considering it, one factor that might be influencing your decision is the difficulty of the application process.

One of the reasons why USG funding opportunities are so daunting is that you usually need to consult multiple documents located across the funding agency’s website (and sometimes, several websites) to understand how to prepare and submit your application. In contrast, applying to a private foundation is usually much easier because all the information you need to understand the opportunity and application process is typically found entirely within the opportunity posting or on a couple of pages of the foundation’s website.

We’ve submitted proposals to several U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Labor, the Department of State, the Department of Agriculture, the United States Agency for International Development, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the National Science Foundation, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In each case, we’ve relied on a combination of tools allowed (or dictated) by our employers. These tools include spreadsheets, tables, lists, calendars, and shared workspaces on SharePoint or Microsoft Teams to collect, organize, summarize, and track all materials relevant to the application. These tools are generally effective at organizing most proposal efforts. However, they are not always sufficient when preparing a response to opportunities released by funders such as NIH and NSF, which have complex, frequently changing application procedures. For NIH and NSF, we’ve found it advantageous to gather all relevant background materials in one place, where they can be searched simultaneously and—this is crucial!—easily cross-referenced. After trying various options, we’ve found the app LiquidText to be ideally suited for this task.

WHAT IS LIQUIDTEXT?

LiquidText is sometimes referred to as a PDF reader. While this is a central function of LiquidText, it isn’t the software’s most compelling feature or the reason why it is so useful for developing proposals. There are many options for PDF readers, including several that, like LiquidText, allow you to highlight text and add notes. What makes LiquidText a standout tool is its ability to create workspaces where you can not only read the content but also interact with it in various ways, such as linking notes to sections of text within a single document and adding connective “threads” between documents.

LiquidText also supports multiple formats. In addition to PDFs, you can upload materials from webpages and Microsoft applications such as Word and PowerPoint. LiquidText also supports content management systems, including Dropbox, iCloud, and Box, and allows you to export your LiquidText projects to popular application formats. For a summary of what LiquidText offers, below is a screenshot from the company’s website that lists some of its features:

COST

LiquidText offers a 7-day free trial, but there is no free option. If you want to try it for your next proposal, you’ll have to pay at least $96/year. For us, because of the number of federal proposals we work on annually, we can justify the cost. However, if you submit proposals mostly to small foundations, it may not be worth purchasing LiquidText if you already have access to a PDF reader that allows you to highlight and annotate text.

As of December 2022, here’s LiquidText’s pricing:

HOW DOES IT WORK?

LiquidText is easier to understand when you see it in action. We’ve embedded a short YouTube video produced by LiquidText that will give you an idea of what it means to add links and connective threads within and between documents. Seeing an example of how LiquidText can be used should also make it easier to follow our description of select features that make it particularly good for proposal work.

☞ Note: This is not a sponsored post. We are recommending LiquidText solely because we use it to manage more complex proposals.

MANAGING PROPOSAL BACKGROUND MATERIALS USING LIQUIDTEXT

Before we discuss how we use LiquidText for proposal work, we want to underscore that LiquidText is a “nice to have” tool that can help with specific tasks for more complicated proposal efforts. It is unlikely to replace the resources you currently use for writing proposals. In practical terms, this means that if you incorporate LiquidText into your proposal process, it’s going to add steps to your proposal process. Even though it adds steps, the extra work can make it measurably easier to respond to certain opportunities, such as those sponsored by NSF and NIH, or others that are similarly complex.

We began using LiquidText earlier this year after realizing how useful it could be for proposals. Since incorporating it into our workflow, we’ve used it as part of our proposal management process for USG proposals submitted to three federal agencies: NSF, NIH, and the U.S. Department of Labor.

When we first decided to give it a try, we were working on an NSF proposal. Prior to using LiquidText, when preparing a proposal for submission to a federal opportunity, we would upload the solicitation and relevant agency guidelines to a Microsoft Teams folder. The folder would include a detailed compliance matrix listing all proposal requirements and the corresponding pages in the solicitation or guidelines where each requirement appears. Although this standard approach gathers all the necessary materials in one location, which is essential, we often found ourselves returning to the source content (i.e., the solicitation and guidelines) for additional context or to confirm a requirement. After discovering LiquidText, the main change we made in our proposal workflow is that, in addition to uploading all proposal-related materials to a collaborative workspace in Microsoft Teams, we also upload all the background materials to LiquidText. By uploading the proposal materials to LiquidText, we can simultaneously search the solicitation and relevant guidelines for keywords, surfacing all instances of a particular term (e.g., “attachments”) in a single view.

So far, this might sound like double the work. Why upload the proposal materials to two different places? Microsoft Teams is a collaborative workspace that lets everyone on the proposal team access the same information. Additionally, Microsoft Teams is also where the working draft of the proposal lives. In contrast, LiquidText is a tool for individuals and is not currently optimized for collaborative work—and it’s also not a document creation tool, so you can’t use it to write your proposal. LiquidText’s primary use is to help individuals engage with various types of materials, improve their reading comprehension, and connect ideas within and between documents. LiquidText will be introducing new collaborative features in 2023, so it’s possible it may become a more team-oriented tool over time.

To help you get a sense of how LiquidText works, we describe the main steps we take to establish and use a LiquidText workspace when preparing a proposal below.

Step 1: Collect

As part of the standard proposal management process, once a decision is made to apply to a particular opportunity, we begin gathering the materials needed to prepare the response. At a minimum, this includes a copy of the solicitation, the applicable guidelines, and any templates provided by the funder. If the application will be submitted through an online portal, we also save a PDF of the online application (if the funder has not provided a PDF version, we will use Adobe to convert each page of the online application to a PDF). For an NSF proposal, the guidelines would include the current version of NSF’s Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide (PAPPG), instructions for submitting NSF proposals through grants.gov (NSF Grants.gov Application Guide), and any special notices that pertain either to the opportunity or the application process.

Sample Steps to Collect Everything Needed to Respond to an NSF Opportunity

Step 1: Find the Opportunity and Download the Solicitation

Step 2: Search the Solicitation for Links to the Relevant Guidelines.

Step 3: Download the Current Version of NSF’s Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide

Step 4: Download the Current Version of the NSF Grants.gov Application Guide

After storing copies of the solicitation and guidelines in a collaborative workspace, we upload them to a project workspace in LiquidText. These are the primary documents we typically consult during an NSF proposal process. If the proposal is a resubmission, we would also upload a copy of the original proposal.

Creating a Workspace in LiquidText

In LiquidText, creating a workspace will feel familiar. First, you might create a folder in LiquidSpace labeled “NSF.” Inside the folder, you could either create a subfolder with the name of the NSF opportunity you are responding to, or you could skip that step and create your proposal workspace as a project in the main folder. To create the project, you need to upload a file by choosing “open file” on the left-hand menu. Once your project space is created, you can right-click it to rename it (the default name is the file name). When you click on the project to open it, on the next screen, you’ll see the document you just uploaded. You can then use the “add document” option to upload additional files to the project workspace.

The LiquidText project workspace has several parts. On the left-hand side, you’ll see (1) some frequently used features for navigating and annotating, (2) a prompt to add documents, and (3) the list of all documents that have been added to the workspace. In the middle area, you’ll see one or more active documents you are currently viewing. In the image below, the solicitation is the active document, and on the left, you can see we’ve uploaded the two NSF guidance documents mentioned earlier. On the right-hand side, there’s a scrolling “infinite” canvas area, which is where your notes and excerpts from the documents will go. At the very bottom of the screen, there are arrows on either side of the document. These arrows let you adjust the document size for easier viewing.

If you want to look at several documents at once, you can do that as well. Each document can be scrolled separately. Below, the two NSF guidance documents are shown side-by-side, making it easier to compare related instructions.

Step 2: Review

After everything has been uploaded to LiquidText, it’s time to read the solicitation and the guidance documents. Using LiquidText’s annotation functions, you can highlight important content and extract excerpts of the text. Because the guidelines for NIH and NSF are lengthy and detailed, you will probably not read them as thoroughly as you do the solicitation. Instead, you might skim the table of contents and focus on a few topics of immediate interest, such as instructions for preparing biosketches. Because LiquidText has an effective search function, as you go through the proposal process in the coming weeks, you can do a keyword search to surface guidance on individual topics as you need it.

To highlight text in LiquidText, select the text of interest. A menu will appear, allowing you to choose the highlight color. If you want to excerpt text, you go through the same process, except that instead of choosing a highlight color, you would choose “AutoExcerpt,” which will move the selected text to the canvas to the right.

Below, you can see that there’s an excerpt from the text on the right. The blue vertical line in the document indicates that the text has been excerpted.

When you excerpt text from a document or add a comment, the excerpt or note appears to the right in the infinite canvas. If you click on the comment box, you will be taken to the location where the text appears in the relevant document. Likewise, if you click on the vertical blue bar in the document, you will be taken to the linked excerpt or comment box wherever it is in the infinite canvas.

Step 3: Search for Keywords

You should now have everything set up. You have your background materials stored in your collaborative workspace, and you’ve reviewed all the key materials, adding notes and highlights. As you and your colleagues begin working on the proposal—starting with preparing the outline—you may need to confirm details from the solicitation to ensure it will be responsive. The ability to search simultaneously across all documents in a workspace and to tie all documents to a single note area makes LiquidText ideal for this task. One area where the ability to search across documents can be especially useful is when seeking guidance on personnel. Personnel-related requirements are covered in the solicitation and the guidelines. Typically, the solicitation will tell you which positions you must include in your proposed project. In contrast, the guidance documents will provide details on the supporting documentation you need to supply for each proposed staff member and where this information should go in the application.

Since we began using LiquidText for proposals, we’ve found it very handy for conducting keyword searches during proposal team meetings. Quite frequently in meetings, an issue or question arises that requires confirming a proposal requirement. LiquidText is great for these moments because you can quickly search all the proposal materials in the workspace to uncover guidance relevant to the topic. Additionally, using LiquidText’s annotation features, you can add notes during the meeting and connect those notes to one or more documents.

Step 4: Final Checks

When you reach the final stretch of the process and are getting ready to submit your proposal, you’ll want to conduct several reviews of the application before uploading it and clicking “submit.” Completing a submission checklist is always recommended during your final review. Additionally, using LiquidText, you can do selective searches across the solicitation and guidelines to confirm steps in the submission process or answer last-minute questions on how files should be assembled or labeled.

After you submit your proposal, you can upload the final copy to your LiquidText workspace. In a few weeks or months, you may need to respond to questions from the funder about your proposal, such as during the Best and Final Offer (or BAFO) phase. LiquidText’s search function can help you search your proposal, and you can use its annotation features to add notes to plan your responses to the reviewers’ comments. Additionally, if your NIH or NSF proposal is not funded, and you decide to resubmit, you’ll find it beneficial to have a copy of your original submission and relevant materials in LiquidText ready to move to a new project workspace.

CONCLUSION

We are just beginning to understand LiquidText’s features and are by no means power users. However, with the features we are familiar with, we’ve found LiquidText to be a useful addition to our proposal workflow.

When you are working on a proposal that requires referencing hundreds of pages between the solicitation, various websites, and guidance documents, it can feel very overwhelming. LiquidText is one of the best ways we’ve found to manage more complex proposals that involve complying with detailed requirements spread across multiple sources. The downside of LiquidText is that it’s an additional step and an additional expense. It’s also not perfect. For example, its search function can be buggy, and the app often closes unexpectedly. Additionally, it’s not designed as a collaborative tool, so it will not replace the workspace you are using to collaborate with your colleagues. However, the benefits of being able to tag content, create and search notes, and link content across multiple documents may outweigh the negatives, depending on the type of proposal work you do.

Other software can do similar things to LiquidText, so if you like the concept but don’t think it is a good match, you may want to explore other options. Two alternatives you may want to consider are MarginNote and Zenreader.

July 17, 2022

Writing a grant proposal usually requires significant collaboration with others. For large, high-dollar value proposals, it’s necessary to assemble a team. Other, less complicated proposals may not require a formal team, but they will still require assistance, such as editing or consultations with subject-matter experts. Keeping a proposal moving forward and coordinating everyone’s contributions can take a lot of work, and many potential obstacles can prevent a team from functioning effectively. These obstacles include differences in communication styles among team members or varying expectations for the proposal process.

After working on many proposal teams of varying sizes and proposal complexities, we’ve found that five things in particular consistently help a team function well together and produce the strongest proposal.

FIVE STEPS TO A BETTER TEAM PROCESS

1. Decide on a proposal strategy before you apply for an opportunity. One of the hardest things about preparing a proposal is designing the proposed project. If you don’t know what you want to do, it’s hard to evaluate whether your project idea is a good match for the opportunity you’ve identified. Some of you may be thinking, but we know what we want to do! We need to build a school, address this community need, teach a specific skill to a specific group, or research this pressing question. You may have calculated how many months or years you think you will need to complete your project and how much it will roughly cost. These are all good things to know and essential building blocks for your project plan. However, knowing what you want to do in broad terms is typically not enough for most proposals. Especially if you are preparing a proposal for a federal agency or a larger private foundation, you will need to describe the project's stages and activities in fairly granular detail. The funder may also ask you to provide evidence that your project will be effective at meeting the need you’ve identified. If you can’t produce the evidence, or if your project idea sounds wonderful but won’t produce measurable results, you’ll have to rethink your strategy.

   Before you start down the path of writing the proposal, it’s crucial to determine if you have the resources you need— the people, the knowledge, and the time—to design a decent project and prepare a quality proposal. What you do not want to do is jump into preparing a proposal only to discover mid-way through the process that you don’t have the knowledge or experience to design the project to the level of detail the funder requires, or the relevant grant experience to prepare a compliant and responsive proposal. Or, possibly an even bigger dilemma, starting the proposal only to find, several weeks into the process, that the team members—or the organization’s leaders—are not in agreement on what the proposed project should look like.

   It may seem like finding the right opportunity is a preliminary step distinct from the proposal development process, since it precedes the writing phase. In some ways, that’s true. However, finding the right opportunity and ensuring you have the resources to respond—and that the key stakeholders agree with the proposed project’s main objectives—is critical to developing a winning proposal. If you can’t articulate your project idea, you don’t have the information you need to evaluate whether the opportunity you’ve found is a good fit. Additionally, if you don’t know what you are going to propose or who is going to implement the proposed project, you’ll almost certainly be spinning your wheels the first couple of weeks of the proposal process because you’ll need to answer these questions before you can move forward with the writing.

   Because finding the right opportunity is essential, the go/no-go meeting is a crucial step in the proposal process. During this meeting, project staff and organizational leaders closely evaluate the funding opportunity to determine whether the organization has the resources, expertise, and clarity of purpose to prepare a strong proposal. The meeting also serves to ensure, before any resources are invested in developing a proposal, that pursuing the opportunity aligns with the organization’s mission.

☞ To learn more about go/no-go meetings, see our post “Overview of the Go/No-Go Meeting Process.”

2. Assume the proposal will take longer than you think, and plan accordingly. “Writing a grant proposal is hard work!” is a statement we often hear when working with a group new to proposal writing.

Writing a grant proposal is not the same as writing a term paper, a journal article, or an essay. A grant proposal may describe past work or state questions that will be researched if the project is funded, but it also must address what you will do to deliver results based on the knowledge, capabilities, and capacity of your organization. And while writing a grant proposal shares some similarities with a program brochure that you might write to educate the public about what your organization does and its strengths, a grant proposal differs from marketing materials in significant ways. A program brochure is about telling your organization’s story your way and highlighting accomplishments.

In contrast, a grant proposal describes specific organizational capabilities of interest to the funder in a way the funder requests. Sometimes funders are not fussy about how a grant proposal is formatted or overly restrictive in their guidelines. Usually, however, the funder will tell you in precise terms what concepts they expect you to cover and how they expect the proposal to be laid out in terms of page size, margins, font style, etc. In theory, sounds easy enough. In practice? Especially if you have multiple writers contributing to a proposal, it can be challenging and time-consuming to produce a document that covers all the right things in the right way and in the right order.

How much time should you budget for the proposal writing process? If you are a core member of the proposal team for a major proposal (e.g., a proposal narrative of 15+ pages in length, supporting materials, and a detailed budget), you may need to block off up to 50 percent of your work week for the proposal development period. For most weeks, the proposal may take up somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of your time, but during other parts of the proposal process, such as the first few days and the lead-up to submission, you may find yourself working on it full-time. A proposal under 10 pages that requires only a summary budget will take less time. And of course, the more time you have to develop the proposal, the less intensive the effort needs to be on any given week because you can spread out the work. That said, a steady level of effort is usually required throughout the proposal process.

To accommodate unexpected circumstances that may slow or temporarily halt the proposal process, it’s always a good idea to add a buffer of time around every major milestone. If you think it will take a week to prepare a first draft of the proposal, budget 1.5 weeks, and if you think it will take 4 hours to prepare the proposal for submission, reserve a full day. By padding your schedule, you’ll be better able to stay on track when the unexpected happens, whether that’s a power outage that disrupts work for a day or differing opinions on the team that slow progress on the proposal.

☞ For more information on planning a proposal, see our post on creating a proposal calendar.

3. Record everything, then communicate it with everyone. Another best practice that doesn’t come naturally to some groups is taking notes during every proposal meeting and distributing them to all stakeholders (or, even better, posting them in a Cloud-based location accessible to everyone).

Taking good notes is important for two reasons. First, having a record of what was discussed will help reduce confusion about the proposal. If someone sees a decision recorded in the meeting notes that doesn’t align with what they thought was decided, the issue can be flagged and addressed more quickly. Second, meeting notes are especially useful for people who don’t regularly attend team meetings but still need to know the proposal’s status (many at the management level fall into this category).

If you’ve never worked on a proposal, proposal team meetings may be new to you. Briefly, a proposal team includes everyone involved in the process—the writers, the people working on the budget, the program staff planning the proposed work, and often the supervisors of many of these individuals. The agendas for each proposal meeting will vary slightly, but the team will usually need to share updates on the same proposal items at each meeting.

Examples of core agenda items that align with major proposal areas include updates on the proposal narrative, budget, project staffing, and partner onboarding. Other items might be status updates on the development of supporting materials, such as an organizational chart or staff CVs. Depending on the proposal’s complexity, the meetings may need to occur anywhere from weekly to daily. At each meeting, whether a 15-minute “stand-up” check-in or an hour-long detailed discussion, someone should be assigned to take notes and share them via email or a cloud-based workspace like Google Drive.

Proposal efforts can get off track for many reasons, but the main reason is poor communication between team members and, in larger organizations, between departments. Holding regular proposal meetings with everyone involved in the process is one way to facilitate better communication, but maintaining an accurate record of those meetings is equally important for preserving team cohesion.

☞ For more on improving team communication, see our post “6 Steps to Better Team Communication.”

4. Store everything related to the proposal in one central place. Meeting notes, proposal drafts, copies of staffing plans, and even budget drafts (with appropriate protections for confidential salary information) should be stored in a cloud-based location accessible to everyone involved.

Why a Cloud-based location and not a local drive? There are several reasons. First, to make the proposal development process as efficient as possible, the proposal draft should be stored in a location that allows everyone to work from the same version. If you save your proposal draft in a cloud-based location like Microsoft Teams, Dropbox, Box, or Google Drive, the platform will automatically save versions for you, reducing version-control issues that inevitably crop up when a proposal draft is circulated via email. If you decide you don’t like the changes made to a proposal on a given day or hour, no problem! You can quickly go back to an earlier version and restore it. Second, Cloud-based storage enables proposal work to be done from anywhere and on any device, including your phone if needed. If you are working with partners outside your organization, using a Cloud-based tool to store your draft will make collaboration much easier. Third, having a single virtual workspace keeps everything related to the proposal in one accessible location, which can save the day when last-minute questions arise and need to be resolved before submission. For example, if your proposal requires references, you could discover on the day of submission that a reference is incomplete, and you need to consult the source material to find the missing information. If the person who did the background research stores her research on her computer and not in the Cloud, that will be a problem if she’s not around on submission day. If all the proposal-related materials are stored centrally, you’ll have what you need to move forward.

Having all proposal materials in an agreed-upon, Cloud-based location will help the team write the proposal collaboratively and work from the same draft. Cloud storage also serves as an insurance policy, ensuring that all materials related to the proposal are preserved and easily accessible.

☞ For suggestions on how to share information with colleagues using Cloud-based solutions, see our posts on how to use Slab and OneNote.

5. Define the roles and responsibilities of every team member. “I thought that was my job” or “I didn’t know I was supposed to do that” are two phrases you don’t want to hear during any group process. For any team, poorly defined roles and responsibilities can lead to confusion and tension. For a team to function well, it should be clear to everyone—ideally, by the time of the kick-off meeting—what each person will be doing. At the kick-off meeting, you don’t need to provide details of every task each person will be responsible for, but everyone on the team should have a defined scope of work. This means that those writing sections will leave the kick-off meeting knowing which sections they will be responsible for, and everyone on the team will know who the proposal manager is, who is leading the budget, and how the budget lead will work with the proposal manager. If the proposal requires finding subject-matter experts to consult on the proposal or recruiting staff for proposed positions, the person taking on these HR tasks will know what they need to do and the timeline for doing it—and, equally important, so will everyone else. Roles and responsibilities for proposal team members should be assigned before the kick-off meeting, but the kick-off meeting is an opportunity to review who will be working on the proposal, what everyone will be doing, and how the process will work, including expectations for team communication.

Regarding roles and responsibilities, an important step often overlooked is defining who has final authority over the proposal’s content. That is, if there’s disagreement on something substantive in the proposal, who gets to decide which approach prevails? In smaller organizations, this role may be obvious and could be the organization’s executive director. In larger organizations with several layers of management, it may not be immediately apparent who has the final say over the proposal’s content or whether it is good enough to be submitted. Although not everyone will agree with the decisions of whoever has the final say, knowing upfront who needs to be consulted and whose opinion must be followed helps make the approval process at least transparent, if not universally agreeable.

☞ For more information on kick-off meetings, see our post “Creating a Proposal Team: Identifying Who You’ll Need.”

SUMMARY

If you are working with a group of people to prepare a grant proposal, there are five things you can do that will help the process go more smoothly. These steps may seem obvious, but they are often forgotten amid the flurry of activity when a promising opportunity is identified. The steps are: (1) define your project and evaluate the opportunity to ensure there’s a good match before you commit to writing the proposal; (2) assume developing the proposal will take a significant amount of your time and may even require full-time effort, depending on your role; (3) keep everyone involved in the proposal in the loop about the proposal’s status and key decisions by having regular team meetings and sharing notes after every meeting; (4) store all materials related to the proposal in a Cloud-based storage site accessible to everyone; and (5) define roles and responsibilities of every team member and review this information at the kick-off meeting, so everyone knows who is doing what.

March 23, 2022

Style guides are reference documents that writers and editors use to ensure consistency within and across publications or materials. Publishers and forums of all kinds — from magazine publishers and academic publishers to corporate websites — use a style guide to ensure that their materials have a uniform look (formatting and design) and language (word choice, spelling, and grammar). Grant proposals also need style guides. For a proposal style guide, the guide covers in-house style rules and any supplemental style guidance provided by the funder.

We published a short post several years ago about developing a style sheet and what types of information to include. If you need a basic overview of what a style guide is, you may want to read that article first and then return to this one.

☞ 📄 How to Create & Use a Style Sheet for Grant Writing

This post is about the next-level questions, which are: Once you create a style guide, (1) how can you quickly find information in the guide, and (2) keep the guide up to date?

Our solution is to create our style guide in a Cloud-based, shareable workspace. We go over how to do this later in this post.

CHALLENGES WITH RELYING ON FILE-BASED REFERENCE GUIDES

Nonprofit organizations have switched to Cloud-based systems to manage everything from team communication and document storage and development to standard operating procedures (SOPs). While things are trending toward Cloud-based tools, many organizations rely on Cloud-based tools primarily for storage. They might create and save Excel spreadsheets and Word documents in folders in Dropbox, OneDrive, SharePoint, or Google Drive, but fail to use the collaborative workspace options built into the platforms like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, or stand-alone tools, such as Notion and Slab.

In practice, this means that staff and teams within an organization can access a Word-style guide and easily update it. However, updating the style guide is the first step. The next step is to notify everyone at the organization about the new version and where it is located. To ensure the style guide reaches everyone, it could be distributed via email, either by sending a link to the new version or by attaching a copy.

The success of either approach, however, depends on recipients remembering the email and saving the link or a copy of the guide for later reference.

Additionally, if your reference materials are created as Word documents or PDFs, another challenge is how to point people to the correct files. If you develop a style guide for a specific proposal, you may need to redirect staff from the general style guide to the new version. But how do you do this? You could insert text or comments into the original style guide to alert people that another version exists and should be used for a particular proposal effort. The downside is that it requires an extra layer of work, and you may forget to go back and delete the message from the original style guide after the proposal has been submitted.

Another challenge with style guides distributed in document format is that finding answers to style questions can be slow, requiring poring through a table of contents or scanning the entire document to locate the guidance needed. (If the style guide includes a detailed index, that helps tremendously, but few of the in-house style guides we’ve encountered have included an index.

A better way to share reference material, such as a style guide, is to give it a permanent home by creating a dedicated page in a shared workspace. Ideally, the workspace will be on a platform that the organization already uses for its day-to-day operations, so staff will be familiar with how to navigate the site and use its features.

ADVANTAGES OF A CLOUD-BASED STYLE GUIDE

The advantage of a collaborative workspace, or knowledge wiki tool, is that it facilitates the writing, revising, sharing, and searching of reference content. Additionally, a collaborative workspace’s URL can remain static—giving the content a permanent address—despite regular updates.

If you create a style sheet template as a PDF, it can be printed out and completed manually or converted to a Word document and completed electronically. The style sheet template provides a straightforward way to capture and organize information. The downside of the template is that, because of its format, it has all the challenges outlined earlier related to revising and sharing. A significant advantage of a style guide developed in a shared workspace is that it retains all the benefits of the original template by consolidating information relevant to proposal preparation while also offering additional benefits, including better version control, much faster search capabilities, and a simpler means of revising and duplicating content.

Another advantage of using a shared workspace to house your style guide is the ability to add a comment section that anyone in the organization can access and use to submit questions. Staff members with editing experience can monitor the comment section and answer questions as they come up.

Finally, a Cloud-based style guide avoids a problem inherent in Word files: over time, revisions to a document can make the file increasingly unstable. With a Cloud-based guide, you’re less likely to run into these issues. You can revise your style guide every day, and the content will remain accessible and editable.

DESIGNING A CLOUD-BASED STYLE SHEET USING SLAB

There are many options to create a shared workspace. For those using Microsoft’s suite of products, you could use the wiki tab in Teams to develop and share a style sheet.

If you use Google’s suite of tools, you could use a Google Site to serve as a one-stop hub for all your style information and reference guides.

If you do not use an integrated suite of tools, you can use several stand-alone options.

In the example below, we use the Slab wiki tool to demonstrate how to build a shareable style guide. However, you can use the tips below to create a similar guide on many other platforms. We like Slab for its intuitive, attractive design, the ability to mark content as verified and current, and its affordability: Slab is free for up to 10 users and as low as $6.67/user at the time of this writing for teams of 10 or more.

☞ 📄 For an overview of Slab, see Simplify Your Knowledge Management System with Slab

STEPS FOR CREATING A CLOUD-BASED STYLE GUIDE

Step 1. Create a New Page

The first step toward an online guide is to create a new page (or post, depending on what terminology your tool uses). In Slab, after logging into your account, you choose where you want your style guide to appear by creating a new topic area or by choosing an existing topic. If you choose to create your style guide under an existing topic, you would click the three dots to the right of the title to open the submenu, and then choose “create a subtopic” or “create a post.” If you want “Style Guide” to be visible in the left-hand menu of your page, you should create a new subtopic.

If you already have a relevant category in your tool of choice, we suggest creating the style guide as a new post under that heading instead of starting a new topic or subtopic. In our case, we already had a subtopic in our resources category called “Writing Guides,” so we created our style guide as a post under that topic. The style guide sections (grammar, punctuation, etc.) will appear as subposts under the style guide subsection.

Clicking on “Writing Guides” opens up a page where you can see a list of all the related posts, subtopics, and subtopic posts that have been published so far.

One example of how to design an online style manual is the United Nations Editorial Manual. The UN’s guide has a landing page that provides a summary of the types of content included in its style guide and includes several graphics to break up the text. If you are a Notion user, you could create a landing page for your style guide that looks and functions similarly. However, a traditional table of contents, which is a format Slab lends itself to, serves a similar purpose of helping people scan the content and quickly find and navigate to what they need.

Step 2. Decide on the Structure

For its overarching organizational structure, the style guide could be a single page or post, where all the content is linked to one URL destination; a landing page that summarizes the content and provides links to other pages or websites; or a series of interconnected pages, all on the same platform and grouped in a single folder.

The next step is to decide how you want to present the content. You could present much of the content in list form like this reference spelling list from the United Nations editorial manual. You could also present the content in a series of tables or a combination of lists and tables.

The structure of your style guide may change over time as the manual expands and you receive user feedback. The advantage of a Cloud-based workspace is that you can reorder page content by dragging and dropping content blocks to where you need them. With a few clicks, you can also change the relationship structure between posts, topics, and subtopics. The other advantage of the shared workspace interface is that changes are saved instantly, so you don’t have to worry about losing your content. If you make a mistake and want to roll back some of your changes, you can revert to an earlier version of a post with a few clicks.

Step 3. Add Headings

The next step is to decide on the outline for your style guide and add the headings and subheadings to your pages. If you decide later that you want to change the order of the headings or rename them, it’s a simple fix to make these changes with Slab and similar platforms. Because of the ease with which you can edit your content, you’ll probably make many changes to your format and content over time.

In our original style sheet, the headings are:

• Abbreviations & Acronyms

• Names, Titles, Places, & Terms of Art

• Font, Styles, & Formatting

• Resources

In our new Slab-based style guide, we’ve chosen a similar structure for the main headings:

• Introduction

• Abbreviations

• Grammar

• Spelling

• Punctuation

• Capitalization

• Formatting

• Resources

The summary page for a subtopic in Slab doesn’t group the associated posts alphabetically, but the list is compact, making it easy to discover what you need (if the list were longer, you could take advantage of Slab’s excellent search function). The introductory section has been pinned to the top of the list to make it easy to find.

Step 4. List Resource Materials

Style Manual

After you have determined where your style guide will live, its structure, and added content (i.e., guidance and examples to help people apply the style), we recommend adding a list of resources to supplement the guide. Even when they are quite comprehensive, in-house style guides will have gaps where they don’t cover a style issue in sufficient depth (or at all). To fill the gap, the style guide needs to list a style manual as the go-to resource for resolving any remaining style questions. Every in-house style guide should be based on a recognized style, such as the Chicago Manual of Style, the Associated Press Stylebook, or the Oxford Style Manual. When the guidance in the in-house guide conflicts with that of the outside resource, the in-house style guide prevails. However, for most style questions, the in-house style guide should provide identical guidance to that found in the style manual of choice.

Writing Tips and Resources

Another set of resources you might want to add are writing guides or summaries of best practices for approaching different types of writing assignments, from proposals to reports to press releases. You could even take it a step further and attach templates for each document type.

For branding purposes, every organization should speak with a consistent “voice.” Creating that voice across various communication materials requires providing clear guidance on how to address specific topics. For example, your style guide may direct staff to use “they” and “their” instead of “he”/“she”/“him”/“her” to demonstrate inclusivity. The writing tips could also provide sample language for addressing commonly asked questions about the organization’s mission, values, history, or even its position on controversial issues. As mentioned above, Slab can display when content was last reviewed and verified (and by whom), which is very helpful for ensuring that content, especially boilerplate content, remains current.

Step 5. Add an Introduction and Instructions

Although it doesn’t have to be in this order, for your final piece of content development, we recommend writing an introduction or preface to the style guide with instructions on how to use it. The benefit of writing this section last is that, after spending so much time immersed in the guide’s content, you’ll know what deserves highlighting in your introduction. Since the content is complete, you can also add screenshots of the various pages in your overview to help orient people to the guide’s layout.

Step 6. Publish

The last step is to publish your manual. In Slab and Notion, publishing content so others can access it is as simple as flipping a toggle or clicking a button on each page or post. This action will also generate a link to the page, which you can share with your colleagues and encourage them to bookmark.

When you publish your page, you can restrict access. You could limit access to a subgroup within your organization or make the content accessible to everyone. You could also make the content public, enabling anyone with the link and internet access to view it. Additionally, on Slab and other platforms we’ve used, such as Notion, viewing and editing privileges are separate, allowing you to choose who can view (but not edit) the content.

Stuck?

If you are unsure how to start a Cloud-based style guide, use our Slab layout as inspiration and copy it into your preferred tool.

May 22, 2022

Writing a grant proposal has several stages. There’s the research stage when you are learning about the funder’s interests, studying the proposal requirements, and collecting background information related to your topic; the outline stage, when you are deciding the proposal’s structure, developing the outline, and determining which content goes where; the writing phase, when you are drafting text; and finally, the submission phase, when you are editing the proposal, completing the final reviews, and collating all the required pieces. Managing each of these stages requires a system of some kind and one or more tools to save content and permit collaborative development of the proposal. While there are many tools to choose from, one readily accessible (and free!) tool that you can use to manage and write a grant proposal is Microsoft OneNote.

OneNote has been around since 2003. Since OneNote debuted, many other digital notebooks and collaborative tools have emerged, such as Evernote, Notion, and Asana. With so many new and popular options, it’s easy to forget about OneNote. But OneNote has several advantages beyond being free, including how well it integrates with other Microsoft applications like Outlook and Teams, and how accessible it is: If your organization uses Microsoft 365, OneNote is included in the suite of tools, making it easy to adopt for managing proposal development tasks.

If you are not familiar with OneNote, it may not be immediately clear how to use it to develop and manage a grant proposal. And even if you are familiar with OneNote, you may use it primarily to store personal notes and not as a project management tool. To introduce you to using OneNote as a proposal management tool, we’re going to walk you through a sample notebook structure that you can use to develop your next grant proposal. Depending on your organization’s culture, the team you are working with, and your specific proposal development needs, your notebook could look very different from ours. However, the structure below might serve as an inspiration and help you visualize your ideal notebook layout.

Before we review our sample notebook, we’ll cover the basics of OneNote, including where and how to access it and some of its core features.

ONENOTE BASICS

OneNote can be accessed through Microsoft 365 or by logging in to onenote.com. If you are using Microsoft 365 or have a Microsoft account, after you log in, click the waffle icon in the top left corner; you should see the OneNote icon. If you do not have a Microsoft account, you can create an account and start using OneNote at onenote.com.

After you sign in to OneNote, the landing page will display a list of your existing notebooks and give you the option to create a new one.

Notebook Structure and Sharing

For proposal management, you can organize your OneNote notebooks in two ways. You can (1) create a new notebook for each proposal, or (2) create a single notebook called “Proposals,” the sections of which will be specific proposal efforts. The advantage of having a single proposal notebook is that it consolidates all your proposals in one place, making it easier to reference or copy content from previous proposals into your active project.

The disadvantage of creating a single proposal notebook is that it can make collaboration on a particular proposal more difficult. This is because OneNote restricts the sharing of OneNote content. OneNote notebooks can be shared with individuals both inside and outside your organization. When you share a OneNote notebook, anyone you share it with can view and edit its entire content. However, OneNote pages are only shareable within a notebook, meaning it is not possible to share or collaborate on select pages. It’s all or nothing, unfortunately. If you want to collaborate, you need to share at the notebook level.

Because of the limitations in collaborating at the page level of a OneNote notebook, when you set up your notebook, you must decide the level of access you want to give others. If you work in a small organization and will always be collaborating with the same group of people on every proposal, managing your proposals from a single notebook might work well. For this structure, you would have a notebook labeled “Proposals,” with sections named after each grant proposal under development. However, if you work with different groups of people on each proposal—and you want to limit each proposal team’s access to only those proposals they are working on—then you will want to create a new notebook for each proposal. Under this latter structure, the proposal notebook would be the name of the funder or the funding opportunity, the sections could include proposal management phases and sections of the proposal, and the pages could be dedicated to proposal subsections (e.g., a section might be “project management” and the pages within that section might be labeled “personnel, “timeline,” etc.).

Importing, Linking, and Organizing Content

As a digital notebook, OneNote is great for taking, storing, and organizing your notes. Depending on the device you are using and whether it has a touchscreen, you can type your notes in OneNote or write them with a digital pencil. In addition to using OneNote to capture text, you can also insert photos, webpages, and even embed (and play) YouTube videos. If you want to include a document or spreadsheet file in your notes, you can upload it to OneDrive and insert a link in your OneNote page, add it as an attachment, or embed it in the page.

If you are using Microsoft 365, OneNote can enhance the features of other applications, including Outlook and Teams. If you have an email you want to save to reference later or share with others, you can forward a copy to OneNote by choosing an email, clicking on the ellipses in Outlook’s top menu, and choosing “Send to OneNote.”

If OneNote does not appear as an option, choose “Get Add-ins” to add OneNote to your Outlook account and then go through the steps above.

Another way to link OneNote to other apps is through Teams. To facilitate access to a shared notebook, you can link a relevant OneNote notebook to a specific Teams channel. The linked notebook will appear as a tab within the team channel.

Managing Meetings

If you use Microsoft Outlook at work, you can generate a page in your OneNote notebook for every meeting in your calendar by opening the meeting invite and clicking on the OneNote symbol at the top of the meeting invitation. After clicking the OneNote icon, you’ll be asked to choose the notebook and section where you want the meeting notes to live. Once you make these choices, OneNote will import the meeting information (e.g., who is attending, the date, any comments sent with the invitation, and the video call information if the meeting is to be conducted virtually), so you can focus on taking meeting notes.

If you are taking notes in a shared notebook, you and your colleagues can take notes together during and after the meeting on this shared page.

Using Templates

If you use OneNote as your main hub for information about funders or proposal development, you may want to create templates for content you know you’ll need to collect for each proposal. For example, you might want to create a template for collecting essential profile information about each of the funders or funding opportunities that interest you. One way to work with templates is to store them in your proposal notebook in a dedicated section called “templates.” When you need to use one of the templates, you can click on the Templates section, choose the page you want to duplicate, and pick the location where you want the copied page to go.

Customizing Your Notebook

One of OneNote’s best features is the ability to customize how things look. You can choose your notebook color, the color of the tabs for each section, and change the background of your pages from the standard blank background to a colored or lined background.

OneNote also offers a list of tags that you can use to categorize and filter page content. One tag that is very useful for proposal management purposes is the to-do checkbox.

SAMPLE NOTEBOOK

Just like a physical notebook, OneNote pages are where you’ll take your notes. In the context of a proposal notebook, pages are where you’ll store important details about a funder, capture ideas, collect background information, take meeting notes, and even start drafting proposal text.

The first page in our “Como Foundation” section is an overview of the funder. The amount of information on funders varies considerably, so you may be able to populate a profile page with significantly more information than shown below. If you can find it, good information to add to your funder overview page includes the funder’s funding priorities, grant history, and profiles of recent grantees. You might also find it helpful to include screenshots of the funder’s website, as we’ve done in our sample page.

Another standard page we created is a proposal calendar page to summarize important milestones. Inserting a table into OneNote is similar to creating and completing a table in Microsoft Word.

If you are working on a proposal that includes an online application, such as the brief inquiry form used by the Como Foundation, you can take screenshots of the application and insert them into your notebook for reference. Next to the screenshots, thanks to OneNote’s limitless scrolling canvas, you can annotate the image and add as much detail as you want about what to include in the form, where to find that information, and any questions you have about the application requirements.

IS ONENOTE THE RIGHT TOOL FOR YOU?

The right proposal management and development tools are the ones you and your colleagues are willing and able to use and have permission to use.

For many of us, Microsoft applications are what we use day-in-and-day-out for our work, which makes OneNote an attractive choice for managing proposal-related tasks. As part of the Microsoft ecosystem, OneNote integrates with Outlook’s email and calendar features, as well as with many other Microsoft 365 applications. If OneNote is used regularly in your work setting, and especially if you and your colleagues are already fluent users, moving your proposal development processes to OneNote should be easy to implement. Additionally, depending on your organization’s policies, another advantage of OneNote is that you may be able to share your notebook with individuals outside your organization, thereby enhancing collaboration.

If you are not currently using Microsoft products at your workplace, there are still several advantages to OneNote, not least its free use.

OneNote’s customizability and ability to store and organize a variety of content make it a good fit for the diverse content and tasks that need to be managed in most grant proposal efforts. Because OneNote is free and accessible through multiple platforms, including the Web, desktop versions for Mac and PCs, and mobile devices, there are few barriers to giving it a try as a proposal management tool. Regardless of what kind of device you use, and even if you only have a smartphone at your disposal, you can use OneNote!

In this post, we’ve covered only a small selection of OneNote’s features and capabilities. To learn more about OneNote, check out the resources below. They are from Microsoft’s website and two former Microsoft employees who both left Microsoft to start YouTube channels where they teach others how to use Microsoft applications.

RESOURCES

Microsoft

• Microsoft Support OneNote help & learning

• Microsoft OneNote video training

YouTube

• Collaboration Coach YouTube channel OneNote playlist

• Kevin Stratvert YouTube channel

  • How to get Microsoft OneNote For FREE!!!

  • OneNote Tips & Tricks

  • How to use OneNote

December 14, 2021

In our blog posts and other materials, we share our experiences related to researching potential funders, writing grant proposals, and managing the process. Based on feedback we’ve received on our blog posts and courses, we’ve found that some of the information we’ve shared has been viewed as discouraging or overly complicated. In this post, we’re going to cover three areas that seem to stir up the most debate.

The three areas are as follows:

• Competitiveness and likelihood of winning grant funding

• Necessity of researching funders and funding opportunities

• Need for a funding strategy and an organized proposal process

In the sections that follow, we go over each of these areas and provide our perspective.

DEBATED TOPICS

Competitiveness and Likelihood of Winning Grant Funding

What we’ve said: Securing grant funding is a competitive process, and the odds of winning any single grant are generally low.

Feedback: So, you’re telling me it’s impossible to get a grant?

Much of our advice centers on navigating the competitive nature of grant funding and increasing the odds of being funded. We don’t focus on the competitiveness of the grant process to be discouraging, and we are not saying you can’t secure grant funding for your project. We strongly believe that organizations can consistently win grants with the right approach, which is why we created Peak Proposals. We want to help organizations write stronger proposals and win more grant money. We believe that grant funding is worth pursuing. However, we don’t want to mischaracterize the accessibility of grant funding. While there are many avenues for grant funding, such as private foundations, corporations, and government agencies, the limitation is that most funders support only a narrow range of organizations and projects.

A prime example is that almost all funders have geographic restrictions, with the vast majority funding only organizations and projects located where they are based or have strong ties. While burdensome to many organizations, geographic restrictions are unlikely to go away. This is why we emphasize researching potential funders to ensure your organization meets each funder’s eligibility guidelines.

Another theme in our blog that has stirred debate relates to when (or if) an organization should apply for grant funding. We don’t advocate grant funding for every organization. For example, many of the organizations that email us seek grant money to cover general operating costs. Grants are typically not a good option to cover general expenses. The majority of grants are designed to cover project expenses, not overhead costs.

And there are other grant limitations we’ve highlighted over the years that many organizations find discouraging. One limitation is that foundations tend to focus their resources on select topics of interest. If only a few funders are active in a specific programmatic area, competition for grants can be quite intense among eligible organizations. Additionally, many private foundations have switched to an invitation-only model, abandoning open calls for proposals. Under the invitation model, the foundation selects the organizations eligible to apply for a grant, meaning that unless your organization receives an invitation, the foundation will not consider your proposal. For small or newly launched organizations that are not well known, the invitation-only model can be a significant barrier.

It’s not all bad news, though. If your organization works on an issue with many active funders, that definitely helps. And if your organization is based in a major city, that helps as well, as does being located in a region with a strong philanthropic community and a stable government.

Apply for grants, but first, do your research to identify the right opportunities! That’s the basic message.

The Necessity of Researching Funders and Funding Opportunities

What we’ve said: You need a system for identifying and vetting potential grant funding sources.

Feedback: Why can’t you (or someone else) tell me what funding opportunities I should apply to?

Most of the emails we receive are requests for money or for the names of funders and funding opportunities the organization should apply for.

In almost all cases, we can’t provide specific recommendations. This is because there are several factors to consider—such as the organization’s history, funding needs, programmatic successes, geographic location, and leadership.

While there are occasional exceptions, for the most part, you will not find a grant opportunity that will award you money to do precisely what you want to do. Instead, you have to look for funders that have interests that match or complement yours and figure out how you can combine what you want to do with what the funder wants.

Since we do not know the resources and capabilities of the organizations that contact us, it’s difficult for us to recommend specific funders. While we can create general funding lists based on, say, country eligibility, we cannot tell an organization which funders from our lists will be the best prospects for them. For that, an organization must conduct its own research, assessing potential funders based on its capabilities and needs.

Does funder research take time? Yes, it can take a lot of time, especially initially, when you are unfamiliar with the foundations active in your programmatic area.

Of course, you can avoid doing the hands-on research by paying someone else to do it. However, even if you hire someone, you’ll still need to be engaged in the process to some extent because whoever you hire will require background information to evaluate potential funding sources.

We know it can be frustrating to hear that there’s not a simple answer to the question, “Where should I apply for grant funding?”. When you ask people—even people who specialize in grant writing—to tell you where you should apply for funding, they may sincerely not know the answer. Although it may not be what you want to hear, there’s no shortcut to finding relevant funders. It takes research and usually investment in tools like a funder database.

The Need for a Funding Strategy and Organized Proposal Process

What we’ve said: You need a funding strategy and an organized proposal process to achieve long-term success in securing grant funding.

Feedback: Why does it have to be this complicated? My strategy is to apply for as many grants as possible.

“You do you” is a popular line these days. It’s meant to empower people to do what feels best to them. In terms of finding grant funding, you can absolutely do your own thing. It’s not an ironclad rule that you need a formal grant strategy or a systematic proposal process to apply for grant funding. We suggest developing a strategy and an organized proposal development system to increase your odds of receiving a grant, but you can choose a different path.

If you are interested in developing a grant strategy, we would encourage you to consider the following questions:

• What projects or programs do you want to fund through grants?

• How many potential funders/funding opportunities exist that might be a good fit for your organization?

• How much money do you need for your project?

• Do you have staff members who can write the grant proposals, or money to hire consultants to do so?

• Do you have a system for vetting grant opportunities to determine if they are right for you?

• Do you have a plan for covering your expenses until (or if) grant money comes in?

If you don’t know why you need the money, you won’t be able to articulate your need to the funder. And if you don’t know how much you need, you won’t know which opportunities will be the best match for your organization. This is why we encourage giving some thought to questions like this before you submit a bunch of grant proposals.

Securing grant funding can take time. However, increasing the number of proposals you submit will not necessarily lead to an influx of grant funding unless you are applying to the right opportunities. If you don’t feel you have the time or skills to develop a formal grant strategy, you can still win grants by pursuing opportunities as they come up. If you choose this approach, the important thing is to evaluate every opportunity to ensure your organization is eligible and qualified to apply, and that you have the resources to prepare a quality application.