How Can You Tell If Your Grant Proposal Is Any Good?

November 20, 2019

After you finish writing your grant proposal, is there any way to tell if it's good?

Someone emailed this question to us recently, and we imagine others have wondered the same. If your grant proposal receives funding, that’s obviously a sign that you did a good job. But is there any way to know before you submit your proposal whether it’s any good?

While there’s no way you can determine with 100% certainty that your proposal will be funded, there are several things you can do to make sure your proposal complies with the solicitation guidelines and is as responsive as you can make it. No proposal is perfect. However, if you follow the five strategies outlined below, you should end up with a submission-worthy proposal.

Five-Step Process for Creating a Responsive, Compliant Proposal 

Step 1: Summarize the Proposal Requirements

As soon as you decide to respond to a funding opportunity, your next step should be to carefully read the funding opportunity announcement (FOA). After you read through the FOA once, you should have a general idea of what the funder is asking and what the proposal will look like.

To gain a detailed understanding of the requirements, review the solicitation again and highlight the requirements related to content (what your proposal must cover) and presentation (the proposal structure and formatting). After your second review, the final step is to create a checklist summarizing all required components.

The summary of proposal requirements will guide you through the proposal process, so take your time preparing it. Because compiling the requirements is tedious, you may be tempted to farm it out to someone else. Resist the urge.

It's okay to delegate summarizing the formatting and submission requirements, but if you'll be the lead writer, we encourage you to summarize the substantive proposal requirements yourself. Is summarizing the requirements going to be time-consuming? Yes, it’s going to take time, potentially a lot of time. Nevertheless, summarizing the requirements is the single best way to become familiar with the solicitation, which is crucial. You need to be thoroughly familiar with the solicitation to write a strong proposal.

Step 2: Recruit Others to Read Drafts of Your Proposal

Another task you need to complete early in the proposal process is to recruit reviewers. If you are writing the proposal, you cannot evaluate how well the proposal responds to the solicitation. For an objective review, you need someone with fresh, unbiased eyes to look at what you’ve written.

Ideally, try to recruit at least two people to review one or more drafts of your proposal, plus the final version you intend to submit. If you can recruit 4 or more reviewers, you may want to assign 1–2 reviewers per draft rather than have all reviewers read every draft of the proposal.

To help you get the level of feedback you need, you may also want to employ a feedback form.

To create the feedback form, one option is to use a table with the questions you want reviewers to answer in the first column. In the subsequent columns, you can reference information such as the relevant page numbers of the proposal and FOA.

Here’s an example of what such a review form might look like:

There’s no right or wrong way to structure the feedback form. In the example above, the questions ask reviewers to focus on areas of the proposal where you’re not sure whether what you’ve written is clear and comprehensive enough. By citing the relevant pages of the solicitation, it's hoped that reviewers will consult it before responding to the questions, although it’s not necessary for them to do so to provide useful feedback.

This Q&A format can work particularly well for early proposal drafts when you need to know if you’re moving in the right direction.

Another way to structure the feedback form is to list the proposal requirements (verbatim, if possible) in the first column. With this approach, you’re not relying on the reviewer to consult the solicitation. Instead, you’re providing reviewers with key proposal requirements and asking targeted questions about whether you’ve addressed them.

This type of feedback form can help you answer the question: Is this proposal responsive to the requirements?

Using feedback forms can prevent the proposal from becoming cluttered with comments and track changes during the review process, which inevitably happens when reviewers enter their comments into an electronic copy of the document.

If the reviewers prefer to enter their comments directly into the electronic version of the document, this can work too with appropriate planning.

First, it’s best to share the document through a Cloud-based platform like Google Docs or Microsoft OneDrive. An advantage of Cloud-based storage is that multiple reviewers can view the document simultaneously, which can speed up the review process. Additionally, reviewers can see each other’s comments. 

If you circulate the proposal by email, you’ll probably see a lot of repetitive comments among the reviewers. There’s also a risk that you’ll end up with multiple versions of the document floating around in email or hard copy.

Second, we recommend you use Word’s comment feature to insert excerpts from the solicitation requirements and any specific questions you want the reviewers to address into the proposal.

Step 3: Check Your Proposal Against the Solicitation

Reviewers play a critical role in determining whether your proposal is responsive to the solicitation. However, you can’t rely on them to catch everything. In addition to the feedback you receive from the reviewers, someone will need to review the proposal and compare it with the checklists you developed in step one.

Things to look for include:

Narrative

• Do you have all of the required sections?

• Have you addressed all the funder’s requirements related to the project’s design and implementation?

• Are the headings clear and numbered correctly?

• Do you have all the required attachments?

Budget

• Is the budget in the required format and level of detail?

• Are the cells unlocked when you submit a spreadsheet?

• Has someone compared the budget to the narrative to ensure they align?

• Have you identified a source of match (aka “cost-share”) if it is required?

• Has someone reviewed the budget justification to check for completeness, formatting, etc.?

To make sure you have time to address any issues, you’ll want to do this review several days before the proposal is due.

Step 4: Read Your Grant Proposal Out Loud

Your goal should be to prepare a proposal that is easy to follow and understand. Reading your proposal out loud is a reliable way to spot problems, including tangled sentences, overly long sentences, and poor transitions between paragraphs. It’s also a good way to catch typos.

Especially if you do not have access to an editor, reading your proposal out loud is highly recommended. It may take a day to go through the entire proposal, depending on its length, so you’ll want to reserve time in your proposal calendar for the task.

Step 5: Have the Proposal Edited

To finalize the proposal, we recommend hiring an editor to perform a final copy edit.

If you hire someone to edit your proposal, save money by giving the editor a final, formatted version of the document that includes a complete and accurate  abbreviation list.

If hiring an editor is not in your budget, recruit a colleague with a good eye for grammar and formatting to do the final review.

If you can’t find a colleague to edit your proposal and you can’t afford an editor, you may have to edit it yourself. It’s not an ideal situation, but by applying a few tricks, you can do a decent job at catching grammar issues, typos, and formatting problems:

• Prepare a style sheet that includes formatting guidance from the solicitation and any institutional style standards you should be following. Using a style sheet can help ensure that spelling and formatting are consistent throughout a document.

• Use an advanced grammar and spell-checking tool like Grammarly, which will catch more spelling mistakes than Word’s spell-checker.

• Step away from the proposal for at least a day before you start to edit.  Without taking time away from the document, you'll be too familiar with it to see the problems.

But Will Your Proposal Be Funded?

If you follow the steps above, you should end up with a proposal that meets the solicitation requirements.

But will it be funded?

The odds are it won’t be. Even under ideal conditions, and regardless of whether it meets all requirements and covers all points clearly and persuasively, the average proposal has less than a 50% chance of being funded when submitted to most funders.  That’s just the reality of the grant world.

It may seem like you’re putting in a lot of effort for a slim chance of success (and you are), but think of it this way: If you submit a proposal that is not compliant and responsive to the solicitation, you’ll have a zero percent chance of being funded. So even though it takes a lot of work to summarize the solicitation, recruit reviewers, revise the proposal multiple times, and have it edited, by following the process above, you’re stacking the odds in your favor by submitting the best proposal you can.