Writing (or Is It Reading?) Your Way to Better Grant Proposals
Nonprofit organizations often struggle to develop a sustainable strategy for pursuing grant funding. While most organizations would like to have a dedicated team to handle all grant research and writing tasks, it’s not always realistic because of cost concerns. Similarly, it’s also not feasible for many organizations to pay for grant writing consultants due to cost concerns: Grant consultants must be paid when the work occurs and regardless of whether a grant is ultimately funded.
Another consideration that prevents organizations from hiring dedicated grant writers is the fact that grant work tends to be uneven and has a variable workload. Most nonprofits are funded by a relatively small number of funders, and these funders’ grant cycles dictate the organization’s grant-writing cycles. For organizations dependent on funding from the U.S. government, busy periods are frequently from early March to mid-June and, as the end of the fiscal year approaches, from mid-August to the end of September. For organizations reliant on private foundations for funding, busy periods may be somewhat different, but they will also typically involve increased activity in the fall and spring (e.g., February to May and August to October). Due to the cyclical nature of the workload, it can be challenging to justify a full-time grant writer position, especially for smaller organizations.
If hiring grant writers is not an option, or if it’s impossible to cover peak grant writing periods with the grant writers who may be on staff, most organizations ask program staff — and sometimes administrative or executive-level staff — to assume grant writing duties. While this can work, the individuals tasked with writing grants may be inexperienced in grant writing or have weak writing skills. In response to this skill deficit, organizations often host webinars or training series on grant writing.
Training Pros and Cons
A training session is a good idea, especially from the standpoint of providing instruction on the grant writing process. However, based on our experience working in organizations of various sizes, these one-off webinars or training series on grant writing typically do not lead to a demonstrable improvement in staff members’ ability to write effectively, although they may increase staff members’ familiarity with grant development processes.
Why is this, and what’s an alternative strategy for improving writing skills if training isn’t the answer?
Not always, but often, the idea to provide training on grant writing comes from a combination of need (“we need more people who know how to write high-quality grant proposals”), desire (“we want to improve the quality of grant writing at our organization), and urgency (“we are in a funding crisis, so we must increase our grant writing success immediately”).
The underlying premise is that by providing training focused on writing, staff will become better writers, resulting in better-written grant proposals, which will, in turn, lead to an increase in awarded grants. Unfortunately, this premise puts too much faith in the power of a few training sessions and overlooks the fact that, in the absence of other measures, training on writing alone is unlikely to have a transformative effect.
This is not to say that training staff on grant writing skills doesn’t have value, because we think training does have a role. We offer a course on grant writing ourselves, which focuses on the mechanics of preparing a grant proposal, including how to approach standard sections and apply specific strategies to address common proposal challenges. Topics like proposal strategy and proposal management are easier to package into a short training program because it’s possible to teach participants tangible, practical tips that they can immediately apply, like how to gather relevant information and organize it in a way that meets the funder’s requirements.
However, training on proposal strategy and management topics is most effective when participants already possess solid writing skills as a foundation and are seeking guidance on how to apply their writing skills in the specific context of proposals.
Although they can be very useful, these practical grant writing courses will not turn non-writers into writers or good writers into great ones. For that, there’s no quick fix.
Writing Anything Well (Including Grant Proposals) Requires a Commitment to Reading and Writing Regularly
Improving writing skills requires two things: (1) a steady diet of reading; and (2) frequent writing. These points are well established, but in-house training on grant writing often overlooks the importance and complementary power of reading, and may believe that training on the qualities of good writing is enough to “up-skill” staff. But writing is only one piece of the equation. By reading regularly, you get exposed to new words and often complex and varied methods for communicating thoughts. If you read across genres, you will see how writing can vary in voice, tone, and style depending on the context. Reading also helps train the eye to identify incorrect spelling, a benefit that comes out in the “that word doesn’t look right to me” moments that we’ve all experienced. Reading widely can also expose the reader to various methods for presenting points and logically supporting them, which is something proposal writers do regularly.
While a reading habit is important, having opportunities to write regularly is also clearly essential. In addition to attending a training session in grant writing, if you want to become a better writer, you need to practice your writing skills. Writing practice provides an opportunity to apply grammar and syntax rules as well as test approaches to organizing your thoughts around particular topics. Writing also reinforces the vocabulary learned through reading.
For individuals seeking to improve their proposal writing skills specifically, an additional layer is gaining experience with proposals. Finding opportunities to practice proposal writing can be challenging for new writers, as organizations prefer to have their proposals written by experienced writers.
Fortunately, it’s possible to address all these competing needs: With planning, an organization can both assign less experienced writers to write proposals and still produce proposals that meet or surpass an acceptable level of quality.
Organizations Can Improve the Quality of Their Grants Without Relying on Grant Writing Training
Because improving writing skills takes time and involves habits that an organization cannot control, such as reading, if an organization needs stronger writers immediately due to anticipated proposal needs, it will be challenging. Under these circumstances, an organization may have to accept “good-enough” proposals while it cultivates staff writing skills or seeks other solutions.
New proposal writers or less experienced writers often produce proposal language that lacks polish or that may not be quite as clear as it needs to be. It’s rarely completely unintelligible; it just takes more effort on the part of the reader to understand the major points. For proposals, the effort piece is an issue if the target reader is a funder who may decide the proposal is not worth their time.
Solutions for improving grant writing in situations like this, where staff with decent (but not strong) writing skills need to be relied upon, are to:
- Use a good editor. Having someone complete a thorough edit of the text can make a significant difference in the readability of a proposal, so of all the suggestions, it’s the one not to skip. If possible, a trained editor is ideal; however, a staff member with a good eye can also be effective.
- Apply a team writing approach. A second strategy is to assign multiple people to co-write each proposal, rather than having a single “lead writer” for the bulk of the writing, plus possibly a few support writers working on one or two of the shorter or supplementary sections. This approach avoids relying on a single person to do all the major writing and ensures that the proposal's quality does not hinge on the skills of a single person. The most skilled writers should be assigned the key sections (e.g., those weighted most heavily in the funder’s scoring criteria), while the writers with less-developed writing skills should be assigned to the lower-value sections. This strategy can require more planning on the proposal management side due to the number of writers to recruit and track, but it can be one of the easiest ways to provide multiple staff members with proposal writing experience without placing a significant burden on novice writers or risking the submission of a substandard proposal.
- Review proposal sections early and often. Another strategy to consider is using a review process that incorporates multiple short reviews at the section level, rather than waiting to review until the writer(s) have a complete draft. Every part of a proposal must work together, using the same terminology and narrative voice to describe the same activities. These considerations are reasons why proposal review stages are traditionally designed to review iterations of a complete draft of a proposal (i.e., first draft, second draft, final draft) rather than individual sections. However, structuring reviews around individual sections— where each part is checked before being assembled into a full draft — allows for a faster feedback mechanism and earlier identification of issues.
Frequent reviews of smaller sections of text also make it easier to mentor new or less experienced writers. To make the feedback more manageable, one or two subject-matter experts can perform targeted reviews of a particular section. For example, one person with project management experience could work with the writer(s) on the activity descriptions, while a senior monitoring and evaluation specialist could work one-on-one with the person assigned to write the performance monitoring plan.
Eventually, the full draft should be reviewed by a panel of people as part of finalizing the proposal. However, if the system works as intended, every component of the proposal will have been vetted thoroughly at the section level, ensuring the proposal does not have any major substantive issues.
- Follow a formula. When a funder posts a solicitation, it is seeking specific information on the “who, what, when, where, why, and how” behind the proposed scope of work. When reading a proposal, the funder’s reviewers are first and foremost looking for answers to the requests for information outlined in the solicitation. They want to see if the applicant understands the purpose of the grant funding and can present a convincing case that it has the capacity to do the work. A proposal consisting of average writing may still be good enough to win, as long as it responds to the solicitation in a way that is generally clear and avoids glaring grammar and spelling issues, which can be major distractions. The “good enough to win” approach may be perceived as a compromise in terms of quality. We view it as a realistic approach. It asks, “What do we need to do to win?” rather than “What do we need to do to produce the best proposal?”, which is a different question.
To adopt a “good enough” approach that enables less skilled writers to work on proposals, it’s helpful to have a formula that writers can apply to their assigned sections. This formula should outline what points to cover in what order, as in: “Start with an opening paragraph that introduces the project, the lead organization, and its partners….The final sentence will summarize the project's goal. In the second paragraph….” The formula will need to be adjusted slightly for each funder and opportunity, but it can give writers an idea of what needs to be communicated to prepare a responsive proposal that provides the key information funders seek.
- Leverage AI. Lastly, writers can ask AI tools to evaluate a piece of writing and indicate where and how it can be strengthened, a step that can be helpful to both novice and experienced writers. One caution is that the AI tool should have security measures in place to protect confidential information from exposure. One secure option is the enterprise version of Microsoft Copilot, which can be used in Microsoft Word and includes data-protection features.
Summary
Many organizations cannot afford dedicated grant writers. As a result, they recruit program and other staff members to write proposals. Some of these recruits may be solid writers but lack experience in proposal writing, while others may be inexperienced in proposal writing and lack strong writing skills. To address the skills gap, organizations often default to providing grant writing training as either a one-time training session or a series of training sessions. The hope is that the training will enhance staff writing skills, leading to higher-quality proposals and, ultimately, more awards.
The difficulty is that writing skills are developed over time. Improving one’s writing not only takes a commitment to writing regularly but also to reading, as exposure to high-quality writing gives readers ideas of how to structure their thoughts in a logical and clear way. Since organizations cannot control the reading part, they focus on the writing piece. Training on writing can help, but only if the organization moves beyond providing occasional training sessions to offering opportunities for novice or less-skilled writers to gain practical experience in writing proposals.
Ways to do this, which balance providing the writers with experience without overly burdening them or putting proposal quality at risk, include employing editors to polish proposals; applying a team-writing approach, where the writing responsibilities are distributed across several writers; using a review process that incorporates multiple reviews at the individual section level before assembling the proposal for a full-draft review; providing a writing formula or recipe that writers can follow to prepare a “good enough proposal” that contains all the key information the funder expects; and leveraging AI tools like Microsoft Copilot to evaluate writing quality and suggest improvements.
Training sessions on writing frequently do not improve proposal writing skills. In this post, we talk about what habits contribute to better writing skills and how organizations can offer more proposal writing opportunities to their staff without the risk of submitting substandard proposals.