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.
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.”
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.