Follow This Plan and You’ll Never Miss a Proposal Deadline
June 20, 2020
One aspect of grant writing that frequently trips people up is that most grant opportunities have fixed or “hard” deadlines. To be considered for a grant, you must submit your proposal by a specific date and time, with no exceptions. Adding to the pressure, the time between when the funding opportunity announcement (FOA) comes out and when the application is due can often be very short. Because of the time pressure, unless you have a plan for how you’ll meet the deadline, you run the risk of either submitting the proposal at the last minute or missing the deadline entirely.
While we can’t guarantee that your proposal will result in an award, we are confident that if you follow the process outlined below, you will submit your proposals on time. Following a system like the one described below will also help you to prepare stronger proposals, with time reserved to prepare multiple drafts and solicit feedback.
If you want to skip the details and cut to the chase on how to never miss a proposal deadline, the strategy can be summarized as follows:
Create a detailed list of all tasks, meetings, milestones and decision points required to prepare a quality proposal; and second, assign a due date for each event and action item, factoring in a submission deadline that is at least 24 hours prior to the official deadline.
By breaking down key milestones into tasks and subtasks and assigning due dates, you will have a clearer idea of the work to be done, which in turn will help you create a realistic proposal plan. It is not a plan to say, “we’ll write two drafts of the proposal by the third week of July and will submit the proposal a day before the funder’s deadline.” Without more detail about what needs to go into the proposal drafts, it will be difficult to gauge if you’re on track to meet the proposal deadline and complete all the pieces required for the submission.
As the saying goes, fail to plan or plan to fail. Your first step, then, is to plan.
A Three-Step Process to Guarantee an On-Time Proposal Submission
The proposal process we outline below consists of three steps: 1) planning; 2) scheduling; and 3) monitoring.
Step 1: Planning
Steps 1 and 2 both actually relate to planning. The difference between them is that Step 1 focuses on identifying everything that needs to be done in the proposal process. In contrast, the scheduling phase (Step 2) involves implementing your plan.
Below are examples of tasks to complete during the planning phase. In terms of time, the general rule of thumb is that you should reserve around 10-15% of the total proposal development period (often around 6–8 weeks for proposals with fixed deadlines) to plan the proposal, including assigning roles and responsibilities, creating the proposal schedule, and reaching a thorough understanding of the solicitation.
There are three key phases to the typical proposal development process: the planning phase, the writing and budget preparation phase, and the assembly and submission phase. As a general rule, reserve ~10-15% of the proposal period for planning, ~70-75% of your time for writing the proposal and preparing the budget, and ~10-15% for the final reviews and proposal submission.
The goal of the planning step is to determine what needs to happen to prepare and submit a compliant, responsive proposal on time (“on time” in this context means at least 24 hours before the deadline).
As part of Step 1, you’ll want to complete the following tasks.
Read the solicitation and create a checklist of the proposal requirements and any supporting materials you’ll need to collect, such as resumes, nonprofit registration certificates, organizational charts, etc.
Determine who needs to be involved in the proposal process within your organization and with external parties, such as partner organizations or consultants. Do you need a dedicated budget person? Do you need to hire proposal writers, subject matter experts, or editors? Do you have partner(s) in mind or lined up already, or do you need to research potential partners? As much as possible, put names next to responsibilities.
Assess the complexity of the proposal. How much work is it going to take to complete the proposal? Will preparing the proposal be a part-time job for 5 people? A full-time job for 2 people? Try to gauge the effort required, as this will also influence the scheduling of interim deadlines.
In addition to reading the solicitation carefully to pull out all the tasks, milestones, and resources you’ll need to complete the proposal, the planning period is also when you’ll do your brain dump of any questions you have about the solicitation or the proposal process.
Some of your questions about the FOA should be sent to the funder, such as whether the funder will accept a specific budget template. Other questions may relate to specific aspects of your organization. An example of the latter might be whether it will be possible to restructure the workloads of those assigned to work on the proposal. The question of whether someone’s schedule should be cleared to take on proposal work must be answered by a specific date very early in the planning period. Along with other task dates, the date by which you need an answer to this question should be entered into the proposal calendar, which brings us to Step 2.
Step 2: Scheduling
After you’ve completed a close read of the solicitation and outlined everything you’ll need to do to prepare the proposal, the next step is to prepare a proposal calendar that includes due dates for all the tasks you identified in Step 1. Every part of the proposal process must be associated with a milestone, and every milestone must go on the calendar.
What Should Be Included In Your Proposal Calendar?
Examples of tasks, milestones, and events that you might want to add to your proposal calendar are listed below. How detailed your calendar needs to be will depend in part on the complexity of the proposal. However, even for relatively simple proposal efforts, there’s a role for a proposal calendar. A proposal calendar serves a dual purpose. It’s not just about setting reminders for deadlines. A proposal calendar shows both when things need to be done and the order in which they need to be done. Depending on your preferences and the format you choose for your proposal calendar, it can also include significant detail about each task or event, serving almost like a work plan.
Tasks and Milestones
A typical proposal calendar includes due dates for a variety of tasks and subtasks, such as dates for:
Creating a proposal outline
Collecting feedback on the outline
Revising the proposal outline
Finalizing the proposal outline
Completing each proposal draft (usually there are at least 2 drafts)
Sending each proposal draft out for feedback
Blocking time for each proposal review period
Scheduling meetings to discuss proposal feedback
Collecting supporting materials (e.g., the proposal annex materials)
Arranging for the proposal’s graphics
Confirming who will create the graphics
Reviewing draft versions of the graphics
Finalizing the graphics
Finalizing the narrative proposal
Agreeing on the final version of the substantive content
Formatting the proposal
Editing of the final proposal draft
Hiring/finding an editor
Scheduling the editing period
Reviewing and resolving the editor’s comments and track changes
Arranging for final reviews and institutional approvals
Submitting the proposal
Preparing the submission cover emails
Uploading documents to a submission portal
Meetings
In addition to all the actions and tasks that require due dates, you’ll also want to decide what meetings should happen during the proposal period. It’s best to schedule the majority of the proposal-related meetings that will happen throughout the proposal period—especially the recurring team check-in meetings—well in advance, preferably by the end of the planning period (roughly the first week of the proposal process). By blocking off schedules weeks in advance, you’ll experience fewer scheduling conflicts and better meeting attendance.
How often you meet, what you should meet about, and who should attend the meetings will depend on the proposal in question. At a minimum, for proposals with hard deadlines (as opposed to rolling ones), you’ll want to meet at least a couple of times a week with the core group working on the proposal. For more complex proposals, a daily check-in meeting is recommended.
In the first couple of days of the proposal period, generate a list of all the meetings you think you will need to hold throughout the proposal process and schedule them before that first week is over. Scheduling the meetings early will get the meetings on everyone’s calendar and ensure better attendance.
Meetings to add to your calendar might include:
Meetings with individual proposal team members on their scope of work
Weekly or daily team check-in meetings
Budget development and review meetings
Meetings on the proposal strategy
Meetings on the proposed project’s design
Meetings to discuss project personnel and hiring needs
Final draft reviews
Meetings with external partners
Calls to vet potential partners
Meetings with partners to discuss their contributions to the proposal and the proposed project
Holidays, Vacation, and Travel
In addition to adding proposal milestones to your proposal calendar, it is also helpful to include the dates when you and other members of the proposal team will be out of the office. At the beginning of the proposal process, as soon as you know who will be on the proposal team, ask everyone to send you the dates they will be on vacation or otherwise inaccessible.
Additionally, add to the calendar any dates when the office will be closed, such as national holidays. Being aware of office closures and personal leave will help you create a more realistic timeline for completing the proposal.
Essential Features of a Proposal Calendar
In this next section, we cover a few of the features of proposal calendars and timelines that we have found most useful for keeping a proposal on track.
Easy to Share and Update
To be useful, a proposal calendar should be easy to share and update. While you can create a proposal calendar using a Word template, the challenge is that it can be difficult to keep the calendar up to date. Additionally, unless you store the document on a shared drive, you’ll have to email the updated calendar whenever there are changes, which can be time-consuming.
One of the easiest ways to create and share a proposal calendar is to use a Web-based calendar tool like Google Calendar or Outlook’s calendar. Like Google Calendar, Outlook-based calendars can be easily shared, allowing all team members to make edits and see updates in real time.
Easy to Scan and Interpret
When you choose your calendar tool, whether that’s a Word document or a Google calendar, using color can help differentiate the various categories of tasks, events, and due dates. Below is an example of a calendar created using Google Sheets. The calendar includes typical proposal calendar content and incorporates color. The advantage of using color is that you can quickly scan the calendar and identify the tasks and events that are most relevant to you.
As Detailed As You Need It to Be
The calendar example above assumes a team of several people working on a proposal for about 5 weeks. It illustrates the potential level of detail that might be required to keep the proposal effort moving forward. The calendar is not meant to represent an “average” proposal calendar, because no two proposal efforts will look exactly the same. Additionally, every organization and proposal team will have different preferences for the project timeline format and the level of detail to include.
If you’re not sure how much detail to add to your proposal calendar, talk to the people you’ll be working with on the proposal to find out what level of detail will be most useful to them. You may find that your colleagues prefer to have only due dates listed on the calendar (in the calendar above, these are the entries highlighted in red) and do not want to see work periods or meetings.
In a Format that Best Meets Your Needs
Gantt Charts
In terms of format, you could go with a traditional monthly calendar like the example above, or use a Gantt chart to monitor tasks and timelines. Gantt charts are typically included in proposals to show the proposed project’s timeline, so most people working on a project proposal should be familiar with the format. The advantage of using a Gantt chart is that it clearly shows the duration of each task and task dependencies, not just deadlines.
Kanban Boards
Another option for managing your proposal process is to use a Kanban board to define, track, and assign tasks. The image below is an example of what a Kanban-style proposal management plan might look like. This example was created using Trello:
Trello also has an option to view the tasks from the Kanban board as a traditional calendar layout:
If you like the Kanban-style format but others on your team prefer to see deadlines and tasks in a Gantt chart, a tool that might meet everyone’s needs is Toggl Plan. Toggl Plan is a Web-based project management tool that lets you view your tasks on a timeline or a Kanban board. Like Trello, Toggl offers free and premium subscription plans.
Step 3: Monitor
The final step to avoid missing a proposal deadline is to continuously monitor your proposal calendar.
Despite your best planning, not all the due dates and milestones scheduled during Week 1 of the proposal process will hold. You’ll need to make adjustments along the way, changing due dates or reducing the amount of time dedicated to a particular task or phase of the process. If your timeline is significantly disrupted, you may need to cut corners and accept a lower level of quality for some parts of the proposal.
To ensure the proposal process stays on track, someone needs to review the proposal calendar every few days, if not every day, to assess where you are relative to where you should be. Monitoring the proposal calendar requires checking in with proposal team members—for example, during regularly scheduled check-in meetings—to see whether they are on target to meet the deadlines for the tasks they are leading.
Because it’s almost 100% guaranteed that some tasks are going to fall behind schedule, it’s wise to add some buffer around key due dates when you are creating your proposal calendar. For example, if you believe you can prepare a proposal draft in 4 days, assume that it will take longer, maybe 5.5 days, and schedule the deadline accordingly. If it turns out that the draft is ready in 4 days, it leaves you with an extra 1.5 days that you can use to cover a slippage elsewhere in the calendar. Having a buffer around due dates will give you much-needed flexibility when things don’t go as planned. However, having flexibility built into your calendar doesn’t help you if you don’t know you need to exercise it, which is why constantly checking your calendar and tracking task progress is essential.
As you adjust your proposal calendar to accommodate interim deadlines that might have slipped, try to avoid changing your target submission date. Submitting the proposal at least 24 hours in advance for an electronic submission should be a non-negotiable. If you plan to submit your proposal at the last minute, you’ll have no margin for error. If you run into issues with the submission process, you may not have enough time to resolve them and still meet the deadline.
Summary
The secret to never missing a proposal deadline involves more than simply deciding to submit every grant proposal 24 hours early, although that change alone will certainly help.
To avoid missing a proposal deadline, you need to take advantage of basic project management strategies, including generating a comprehensive list of what needs to be done; determining the optimal workflow (i.e., task dependencies) to complete the proposal; setting due dates for every task and milestone; and finally, constantly monitoring where you are in the process and making adjustments as needed. If you always know what you need to do and where you are in the process—and if you’ve scheduled meetings and assignments in advance—it is pretty much guaranteed that you will meet your deadline.
Most grant writers have been asked at some point to “massage” unfavorable facts into preferred ones, or have seen their fact-based prose reworked by others into something that has the essence of truth but is not strictly true, or is at least less transparent. To some, this may sound like business as usual and what you need to do to win a grant. However, these little acts of truth-stretching, which can take the form of exaggerations, omissions, and misrepresentations, can exact a cost.