August 17, 2021
Preparing a grant proposal is a deadline-driven task, and sometimes, those deadlines can be very close at hand by the time you discover the opportunity and decide to apply.
If you only have a few weeks to pull together a grant proposal, what’s the fastest way to pull together a proposal?
In our experience, it comes down to developing your proposal in stages, beginning with detailed planning.
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 a few weeks.
Proposal Development Stages: Eight Steps to a Quality Proposal
The process described below outlines how to draft your proposal.
However, before you start any writing, there’s a critical preliminary step: You need to review the solicitation carefully to ensure you understand what the funder is requesting. Doing this will help you confirm that you have the resources needed to pull together the application.
Depending on the complexity of the solicitation, determining whether you have the knowledge and resources to prepare the proposal can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Because a solid understanding of the solicitation is critical, it’s a good idea to have several individuals at your organization read it independently before convening to discuss what it will take to respond. These discussions can help you gauge the work required to prepare the proposal, identify key people who can assist with the process, and outline a preliminary timeline for completion.
After you’ve completed the preliminary assessment of the solicitation and determined the funding opportunity is a good fit with your organization’s expertise, mission, and direction—and that you and your colleagues have the necessary skills to prepare the proposal—your next task is to plan the writing process. This is where the eight steps outlined below come into play.
To help you picture how long the process will take, we’ve assigned estimated timeframes for each step. Our estimates are based on a proposal period that is at least 4 weeks. However, if you have less than 4 weeks, no worries! The process will work if you follow the steps. The time periods can be adjusted as needed.
Step 1: Prepare the Summary of Requirements (Number of Days: 1–2)
You’ve carefully reviewed the solicitation and are excited about the opportunity. But can you remember all the proposal requirements, from page limits to required attachments? You may think you know the proposal guidelines, but it’s easy to gloss over the details when reading a solicitation. To ensure you stay on track when you begin the writing process, reserve time to create a checklist of all the proposal requirements, both substantive (i.e., what the funder wants you to include in your project) and procedural (e.g., formatting and submission requirements).
How long it takes you to complete this step will depend on the complexity of the solicitation. For a simple proposal, the task could take a couple of hours. For longer and more complex proposals, the task could take at least a full day.
In your checklist, note all “must, will, should” statements in the solicitation, which indicate essential elements that must be addressed in your proposal.
Regarding the checklist’s structure, it’s advisable to list each “must, will, should” statement in a separate line. Otherwise, you may miss individual requirements.
Additionally, split the checklist into two parts: the first section covers substantive issues to be addressed in the proposal narrative, and the second section addresses procedural requirements, including formatting, page limits, and submission instructions. For example, if the proposal will be submitted electronically via an online form, you will want to add any character or word limits to your checklist.
Most proposals have clear page limits, and a checklist is ideal for tracking them. If you are working on a proposal for a private foundation, your narrative, budget, and budget justification may need to be submitted as a single document, with all parts counted toward a total page limit, with no limit on the length of the individual sections. For more complex proposals, you may need to track page limits for each section, in addition to the total page limit. Additionally, if the budget must be submitted separately from the proposal narrative, you will need to track a separate set of page limits for the cost proposal, including the budget and the budget justification.
Creating this checklist takes time. However, the information it summarizes will keep you on the right path as you write and help ensure you include all essential elements in your proposal. The checklist will be useful for your internal reviewers, who can use it to guide their reviews and confirm that the proposal complies with the funder’s guidelines.
Step 2: Draft Your Outline: Main Headings & Subheadings (Day 3)
Once you have prepared the checklist of required elements, you should be familiar with the proposal requirements and objectives. You’re now ready to draft the proposal narrative.
It’s not the time to sit down and write entire paragraphs, though—that comes later. In step two, your focus is on the proposal outline.
The basic outline for the proposal may be provided by the funder as part of the solicitation. For example, the solicitation may stipulate what the main headings are, which could look something like the outline below:
I. Executive Summary
II. Background
III. Activities
IV. Past Performance
V. Management & Staffing Plan
VI. Anticipated Challenges & Risks
VII. Sustainability Plan
VIII. Budget
The funder may take it a step further and give you the subheadings in addition to the main headings, which might look like the following:
I. Executive Summary
II. Background
A. Summary of Issue (i.e., Problem Statement)
B. Background & History (what has been done to address the problem so far)
C. Opportunities (where there’s room to accomplish change)
III. Activities & Outcomes (description of the activities you plan to undertake and the specific outcomes you expect to achieve)
IV. Past Performance (description of similar projects you’ve worked on in the past)
V. Management & Staffing Plan
A. Management Structure (How will you ensure that you meet the project objectives?)
B. Key Personnel (Who is going to lead the project?)
C. Partners (What other organizations are going to join you in the project?)
VI. Anticipated Challenges & Risks (what problems do you anticipate encountering, and what is your mitigation plan)
While government-issued funding opportunities typically specify how proposals should be structured, private foundation funding opportunities may provide little guidance. In these cases, you will need to create your outline based on the solicitation's content, using standard headings like those listed above.
When you add headings and subheadings to your document, take a moment to format it, adjusting the font style and size and the page margins according to the proposal’s guidelines. Adjusting the formatting now will save time later. Additionally, if your margins are correct and you’re using the appropriate font style and size from the beginning of the proposal process, you’ll be able to assess more accurately whether your proposal is staying within any required page limits during the writing process.
For tips on how to format your proposal using Word’s style settings, see our free tutorial Proposal Templates 101.
Step 3: Insert Evaluation Criteria as Comments (Day 3)
As you work on your proposal, it helps to keep the funder’s evaluation criteria in mind as you write. To avoid losing sight of the review criteria, we suggest including them in your proposal template. We usually insert the criteria as comments next to the relevant heading, keeping them visible but out of the way.
Inserting the review criteria is useful for proposal writers and reviewers of proposal drafts. Proposal reviewers often don’t have time to read an entire solicitation. Placing the review criteria prominently in the proposal draft can make the reviews more targeted by reminding reviewers of the funder’s priorities.
Where Can You Find the Review Criteria?
Foundations, particularly smaller ones, often do not share how they will evaluate and score proposals, though the call for proposals may include general language such as “what we look for in proposals.”
Solicitations released by the US government and other major funders typically include a breakdown of the scoring criteria in the body of the solicitation. The review criteria may indicate how many points each section of the proposal is worth and what reviewers will look for to determine responsiveness.
Step 4: Insert Prompts (Day 3)
After the basic structure of the proposal is in place, with headings and subheadings, the next step is to insert prompts to guide and inspire the writing process.
The prompts can come from a variety of places:
You can add excerpts from the solicitation, such as “must, shall, will” statements.
You can add reminders of specific things you want to include in the section. For example, in the personnel section, you might add a reminder to include information about the proposed project director’s supervisory experience.
If you plan to cite external content, such as journal articles or federal datasets, you could add links to the content to make the external data easier to cite when you enter the writing phase.
If your proposal includes graphics, you can include ideas for them, or, if you will be modifying an existing graphic, you can link to the current graphic or paste the image into the outline.
Lastly, as you review the proposal and add guidance for the writer, it’s a good idea to include the page limits directly in the outline, either as comments or in parentheses next to relevant headings. As with the evaluation criteria, keeping page limits front and center helps writers stay within them and encourages reviewers to consider cutting or consolidating text.
Step 5: Add Topic Sentences (Day 4)
The final step in building the structure of your proposal is to add topic sentences beneath the headings and subheadings. Topic sentences express the main idea of a paragraph and emphasize key points. In the example below, the sentences in bold font illustrate potential opening sentences for the paragraphs in Section A: Management Structure.
The topic sentences underscore three points for the reader: (1) the lead organization is qualified to lead the project; (2) the partners are experienced; and (3) the project team is organized to facilitate collaboration and communication.
V. Management & Staffing Plan
A. Management Structure
¶ The proposed project will be led by Organization ABC, which has more than 20 years of experience managing x kind of project. (The paragraph would highlight the administrative structure, skills, and communication mechanisms of the organization and how the lead organization will ensure that the project deliverables are met, which might include profiling the experience of key personnel.)
¶ Organization ABC’s partners, Y and Z, both have more than 10 years of experience working on large-scale projects similar to the one proposed. (Paragraph might provide a brief mention of the partners’ experience with similar projects and then move on to list how the partner organizations will work with the lead organization, including highlighting relevant experience among the partners’ key staff.)
¶ The project’s organizational structure fosters communication across the project and the sharing of resources, knowledge, and expertise (see organizational chart below). (The paragraph might introduce the project’s organizational chart, which would be an opportunity to describe how the partners will collaborate and communicate with each other and with the funder.)
Step 6: Repurpose Language from Existing Proposals and Reports (Day 4)
Step 6 is straightforward: insert snippets of content from past proposals, reports, and other documents into your outline. While you’re adding content in this step, you don’t have the pressure of writing anything “new.”
While this task should be easy, it won’t necessarily be quick unless you have stored past documents—or even better, small excerpts of text on specific topics—in an organized way. (To read more about organizing a proposal archive to make it easier to retrieve text later, see Creating a Content Library for Your Best Content).
Some of the text you paste into the outline at this stage might be boilerplate. Boilerplate is text that can be reused with only minor updates. Common boilerplate includes standard language about an organization’s history, past performance, and key staff members. You can read more about boilerplate and some of the pros and cons of using it in our post Make Grant Writing Easier by Using Boilerplate Text.
Although it can save time to add text from earlier documents, you always need to review the imported text carefully to see if anything might be outdated. For example, if you add text from a previous proposal that includes a reference to the number of people served through your programs, you’ll want to confirm that those numbers are still accurate.
Step 7: Write New Content (Days 5–11)
By this point, you’ve analyzed the solicitation, created a framework for your proposal, and jump-started the writing process by adding prompts, excerpts from other documents, and boilerplate.
Now the real writing begins.
For the next several days, those with writing assignments will work on their sections. If you have a short proposal, the writing window could be just a couple of days, though ideally, you’ll have at least 5 days to write the first draft.
By the end of the writing period, you should have a complete proposal draft ready for internal reviews, with every section of the proposal populated with a combination of repurposed text, new text, or both.
During the first internal review stage, which could last anywhere from 24 to 48 hours, your colleagues who know the organization’s capabilities and the subject matter will read the draft and provide specific feedback on where the writing is unclear or unresponsive to the proposal guidelines. Reviewers are often tempted to wordsmith and point out grammar issues. While their impulse to correct the writing is understandable, you really need them to focus on highlighting where there are gaps and what you can do to close those gaps.
Step 8: Reviews and Revisions (Day 12 until submission)
The final step in the process is to revise your text based on the reviewers' feedback.
How many review-and-revise cycles you go through will depend on several variables, including the length of the proposal, its complexity, and how much time you have before the due date. At a minimum, you should schedule at least two reviews: a review of at least one draft, and, if you are short on time, one last review before you submit the proposal. The final review should assess the proposal's completeness (i.e., whether it includes all required sections and attachments) and overall readability. At the final review stage, you’re too close to the deadline to do a major overhaul of the proposal, so the reviewers’ feedback should focus on whether all required sections are present and whether the proposal is generally adequate. The final days of the proposal process are not the time to overhaul your project idea or staffing plan.
Conclusion
One of the biggest challenges in writing anything is getting started. With proposals, it can be tough to get started under the added pressure to write a great one and bring in much-needed revenue.
The eight-step process we outlined above facilitates grant writing by “seeding” the document with material you have on hand or that you pull from the solicitation. Using this process, you never face a blank page. You always have guidance on what to cover in each section through prompts, sample text, and evaluation criteria.
A key to using this process successfully is taking the time to read the solicitation and building a comprehensive outline that follows the guidelines. While it may feel like you need to start writing immediately to meet the proposal deadline, we think you’ll find that the proposal will come together much more quickly if you delay the writing until after you have a solid outline.
Want some more tips? For additional reading on writing grant proposals, please see our list of blog posts related to proposal development.