IT’S FINALLY TIME TO WRITE THE PROPOSAL
SO NOW YOU KNOW how to find funding opportunities, how to read requests for proposals and funders’ guidelines, and how to match funders’ needs with those of your organization. You have pulled together files of information about the organization and all the other materials you will need for proposals. And you understand all the unsaid and sometimes intangible elements that are involved in the process of writing a good proposal. You realize that preparing a grant proposal is a process, not just a simple matter of responding to a series of detailed questions and attaching a batch of forms and adding columns of dollar amounts. You know that to be a successful proposal writer, you have to put your grant in perspective; you have to understand the mood of the country at the time you are submitting your proposal, because this affects how a reader will respond. You know you have to understand the issues facing your city or town, and the concerns of philanthropy. You have taken pains to know the particular grantmaker you’re approaching, whether it is a government or private funding source. You know that getting the funder to believe in your organization, to trust it, and to feel sure that its leaders know what they’re doing are essential to winning a grant, as are getting the funder to recognize that you’ve thought things out, that you’re not greedy, that you’re honest.
And, of course, you know your organization well, and are able to place your program in the context not only of your organization’s mission but also in the context of what the community—and the grantmaker—needs and wants. And you’ve engaged the key staff in the process. Now you need to put your proposal on paper, and the lessons in this part of the book will help you do it.
Lesson 6 focuses on the actual writing of the proposal. Because bad writing can undo all your hard work in preparing for a proposal, we lay out some of our own admittedly idiosyncratic dos and don’ts to ensure that the words you put on the page will communicate what you want to communicate to grantmakers and not offend them.
In the succeeding chapters we go into more detail about the separate sections of the typical grant proposal. Lesson 7 focuses on identifying and describing the need for your proposed program. Lesson 8 helps you figure out something that often stumps all of us: how to describe the goals and objectives of your project. Lesson 9 continues with a discussion of how you can develop and describe the program in light of the objectives—and communicate all of this to the grantmaker. Lesson 10 addresses a topic of interest to many of our Funders Roundtable panelists: collaboration as a way to strengthen the program. Lesson 11 focuses on evaluation, another concept that is hard for many organizations to master, and provides a few alternative ways of dealing with this issue. Lesson 12 explains what it takes to convince a funder that your budget makes sense, and Lesson 13 addresses an increasing concern of grantmakers: how you will sustain a program once a grant runs out. Lesson 14 tells you how to persuade the funder that your organization is amply capable of managing a grant if you get it. Lesson 15, the last lesson in this part, pulls together all the bits and pieces of a proposal that should accompany it—or not: the cover letter, the abstract, the table of contents, and the appendices (attachments).
Closing this part, we present our next Funders Roundtable, giving you a chance to hear the panelists discuss the importance and value of each part of the proposal.