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-written proposal but fail to consider how the reviewers will read and evaluate it, your proposal may not score well.

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.

When you come across a funding opportunity that looks like it is a good fit, it can be tempting to start work on it immediately, especially if the deadline is only a few weeks away. But jumping into the writing phase without first reading through the solicitation carefully is always risky.

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.

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 done is write about how to become a grant writer. We’re going to cover this topic now, sharing three different paths.

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.

Writing a proposal and sharing it with multiple donors via email usually doesn’t lead to success for several reasons.

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.

After seeing a few proposal turnarounds, where mediocre proposals have been transformed into much stronger ones, we’ve discovered that taking three steps can work wonders.

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. After trying various options to stay on top of federal guidelines, we’ve found the app LiquidText to be ideally suited for this task.

After working on many proposal teams of differing sizes on proposals of varying complexity, we’ve found that there are five things that consistently help a team function well together and produce the strongest proposal.

Proposal style guides cover in-house style rules and any supplemental style guidance provided by the funder. A cloud-based, shareable workspace is an ideal way to create a shareable style guide.

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.

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.

Nonprofits are always told to diversify their revenue streams. On its face, this advice makes sense. There’s no question that several sources of income provide better financial security than having a single source. But can all nonprofits successfully pursue diversification?

Based on our experiences writing grants for nonprofits as employees and as consultants, we’ve compiled what we regard as some of the most important factors to consider before you decide to become a grant writer.

We can’t promise that following the steps outlined below will result in a grant. However, if you follow the steps, you should be able to prepare a compliant, responsive proposal within few weeks.

A content library is a storage site where you save different types of content, including templates, excerpts from documents such as proposals and reports, and even audio and video clips. In this post, we review several tools and suggested approaches for establishing and organizing your library so you can easily find and reuse previously created content.

We recommend using at least one grant database on a regular basis if you are serious about finding grant opportunities. The key issues are: What kind of information do you want your database to contain, and what can you afford?

Each month, we receive a significant number of emails with questions about how to get grant funding and where to look for funding, as well as more specific questions related to securing grants for particular types of projects. While there are always a few questions that require tailored answers, most of the questions we receive fall into a handful of categories.