January 01, 2017
After you decide to respond to a funding opportunity and have your team of writers, reviewers, and support people in place, you'll need to organize and launch the writing process. It takes multiple drafts to get a proposal ready for submission. Before you begin the writing process, you'll want to create a proposal calendar to plot out how many drafts you'll create on your way to the final draft.
The number of drafts you'll need depends on the type of proposal. For the average grant proposal, plan on at least three drafts. For most proposals, three drafts (with a formal review in between each) is a reasonable target if you have 4 to 6 weeks to prepare. If you have more than six weeks, begin with a six-week process built around three drafts and use the extra weeks as a buffer.
Extending the proposal process beyond six weeks doesn't always yield a more finely crafted proposal. If the second draft is still pretty rough, or if you've only been able to produce a partial draft in that time, consider adjusting your proposal calendar to add a fourth draft.
For many reasons, primarily the proposal team's burnout, it makes sense to produce the proposal as quickly as possible without compromising quality. Schedule the proposal process for a reasonable number of weeks rather than the default maximum.
If you do decide to extend the proposal development period, pause the proposal writing for a day or two to evaluate your process. It's possible the proposal isn't coming together because the team configuration is not quite right. Maybe you need to engage new writers who can articulate the project goals more clearly. Or perhaps you need to recruit external reviewers who can bring greater objectivity and help redirect the proposal to highlight its strengths. On the other hand, the proposal development process may be fine, and the team members are in the right roles, but the project strategy is flawed and doesn't work at a fundamental level. Adding more drafts will not fix a proposal built around a poorly conceived idea.
And of course, adding more drafts and changing your proposal team configuration will not help if you are writing a proposal that isn't a good fit for the funding opportunity. If you are struggling to produce a proposal responsive to the funder's interests, it may indicate a poor fit between your project and the funding mechanism. If this is the case, consider halting the process and looking for another grant opportunity.
What You'll See with Each Draft If You Follow a Three-Draft Process
First Draft: The first draft takes the longest to create. You are starting from a blank slate, and generating the initial content can be a slow and arduous process. Expect the first draft to come together slowly. Budget at least a week for its development. Subsequent drafts, unless you need to do a major rewrite, should not take as long. The first draft will likely be choppy—especially if there are several writers—and will have significant formatting issues and grammatical errors. All of this is okay. The purpose of the first draft is to initiate the process and develop the proposal's framework, so treat it as a brainstorming exercise. Ideally, your first draft will be a complete proposal narrative, excluding any supporting materials for the appendix.
Second Draft: The second draft is about refining your ideas. By the second draft, you'll want to start fixing the formatting. When the proposal is formatted correctly, you'll be able to evaluate more accurately how you stand relative to the page limits. If you wait too long to format, you may find that once you adjust the margins and font size, you'll be scrambling to trim text at the last minute. Additionally, by the time the second draft is assembled and goes out for review, you should have all of the supplementary materials identified, if not included, in the draft. Supplementary materials may include proof of nonprofit status and letters of support or copies of an organization's recent newsletter. As with formatting, you don't want to wait too long before you pull together the supporting materials. Some materials — such as a staffing plan — will need to be included in the formal review process. Other materials, such as an organizational newsletter, can be appended at the end without additional review.
Third Draft: The third draft is where the polishing occurs. Now is the time to start worrying about grammar. Your proposal should now be within the page limits, and your supporting materials should be ready. When reviewers look at the third draft, they should see a complete version of what will be submitted. By the third draft of the technical (narrative) proposal, the budget should be ready and under review. Depending on the proposal's size and complexity, the technical proposal and budget may be developed and reviewed by different teams. You'll need to coordinate the process so that the budget and narrative pieces are ready at the same time for the final packaging and submission.
Final: The final draft should be submitted several days before the official due date. You'll want to leave as wide a margin as possible around the final due date to accommodate last-minute glitches. These could include technical issues with the submission process or mail delivery delays due to inclement weather. The final draft will be your best effort on all fronts. The proposal will be correctly formatted, all glaring (and many not-so-glaring) grammatical errors will be resolved, and all pieces of the proposal package will be labeled appropriately. In addition to finalizing the proposal, while the final draft is being assembled, you'll need to spend some time creating a cover letter to accompany the submission. If you work with a larger organization, you may need to account for multiple layers of institutional review; these reviews may require further edits before the proposal can be submitted. You'll want to budget a generous amount of time to go through all the formal review processes, which can take a couple of days. However, within 24 hours of a due date (preferably 48-72 hours before), the review process must be completed and the proposal submitted.
As you develop your proposal calendar and think through your draft process, here are five tips to keep in mind:
Five Tips for a Better Proposal
Know your limits: When you decide to respond to a funding opportunity, an essential first step is to complete a resource assessment.
Time: Realistically, given everything else you and your team have going on, how much time can you afford to spend on the proposal? If you are already stretched and working toward meeting several project deadlines, you'll need to factor in how many hours it will take to meet your other obligations. You may find you can dedicate only 2 hours per day during the workweek to the proposal. Ten hours a week is not much time. Are you willing and able to work on the weekends during the proposal period? If not, can someone else on the team increase their efforts to fill any gaps?
Money: How much money is in the budget for proposal development? Proposals cost money to prepare. There are material costs such as paper, ink, binders, and postage that must be factored in. If you need to submit multiple hard copies of a proposal, you may need to use a professional copy center; add these costs as well. Overall, the cost of the materials should be relatively low. Much of the proposal development process and often the proposal submission itself can be done electronically. However, material and equipment costs are still important to note, especially if you have a tight budget.
Human Resources: One of the most important assessments will be of HR. Ideally, you will have evaluated whether you have the necessary people to write the proposal during the opportunity evaluation phase. Still, you'll want to follow up with team members to learn their weekly schedules and when each person can work on the proposal. If you learn that one of the reviewers can complete her review only on a handful of dates during the proposal period, and her review is considered crucial, you'll need to ensure that the proposal draft is ready in time for her review. If you miss the window to have her review the draft, what will you do? Is there someone else who can take on the review and do, maybe not as good a job as your planned reviewer, but an adequate job? If you have a team member who is essential to the review process and cannot be replaced (e.g., the executive director), what can you do to ensure the proposal draft is ready on time for her review? Before you begin the proposal, identify any "hard stop" deadlines you must meet and commit to keeping the proposal on schedule.
Anticipate delays: The proposal calendar you create at the beginning of the proposal process is your ideal schedule. In all likelihood, it will not be the final one. Some of the dates will slip. There will be a few non-negotiable deadlines you'll plan around, such as the submission deadline and dates set by team members' schedules, as discussed above. You're also likely to experience missed deadlines. Anticipate many adjustments throughout the proposal process. To accommodate missed deadlines, add buffers throughout the proposal development process. For example, if you think it will take five days to create a first draft, schedule it for five days on the "official" proposal calendar circulated to team members. Next, create a "shadow" calendar that only you can see, with a Plan B schedule that includes extra days built in for each stage. With a Plan B ready, when the inevitable slippage occurs, you'll know you'll still be okay and able to meet the submission deadline. Another way to add flexibility to the proposal calendar is to plan to have the final draft ready a week before the submission deadline. If you don't end up needing the extra week, there's no downside; you'll just submit the proposal early. If you do experience delays during the proposal's development, you'll be grateful for the extra time.
Expect unanticipated issues: In addition to missed deadlines and team member schedule disruptions, there will be other problems. Although you won't know in advance what kinds of problems will come your way, expect problems at each stage of the process. These unexpected problems are another reason to create a proposal schedule that accounts for delays. Anticipated problems that can affect your schedule include writers who fail to submit their sections on time, or a budget that's behind schedule due to delays in receiving salary figures from HR. Unanticipated problems come in many forms. They include tech issues (computers crashing, corrupted files), weather issues (tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards — anything that can cause power outages and office closures), and personal calamities (illness of a key team member). Something is going to happen that will disrupt the status quo. While you may not be able to plan for everything, you can take a few steps to mitigate potential interruptions. You can save your proposal drafts in the Cloud instead of on a drive on your computer to protect the proposal in case your computer dies. You can email yourself the latest proposal draft as a backup in case your Cloud storage is unavailable. You can save drafts of the proposal on a regular schedule under new file names as a security against corrupted files (i.e., instead of clicking "save," do a "save as" with a new file name, which might be the name of the draft, the date, and the time [hour and date] of the save). Weather and personal issues can be a little harder to prepare for, but simple steps like taking your work computer home every night can be helpful if you find yourself unexpectedly out of the office.
Prepare for conflict: As you move through the proposal process, you may find confusion within the proposal team about roles and responsibilities. Or maybe there is no confusion, but there are team members who are not doing what they need (and agreed) to do. Proposal writing is not fun for most people. Particularly with a high-stakes proposal on which an organization's survival may depend, emotions can run high. Expect unhappiness and stress. Expect that the long hours and lost weekends will make team members irritable. However, there are some things you can do to help prevent conflicts from brewing. Having flexibility in your proposal calendar will again be key. If you can give someone an extra two days to submit their piece because you've built in extra time into the process, you'll reduce their stress and keep the proposal on track. Another thing that can reduce conflict as you move through the proposal process is understanding your boundaries around what you will and will not do and making sure each member of the team does the same. If you know in advance that a team member cannot work on weekends, you can build that into the process from the start. As part of the team-building process, articulate your work style and boundaries, and encourage others to do the same so everyone knows and respects each other's limits.
Be clear on your goal: One thing that can derail a proposal is the pursuit of perfection. The proposal does not need to be perfect. Your goal should be to submit a proposal that is responsive to the funder's needs and compliant with all submission requirements. It needs to be clearly written. It doesn't need to be perfectly written. During the early stages of the proposal process, when the proposal is still rough, some reviewers may spend time correcting grammatical errors. Grammar is certainly important, and egregious grammatical errors must be corrected before the proposal is submitted. However, in the first and second drafts, grammar issues should not be the focus. The initial focus should be on crystallizing ideas and achieving clarity of thought on the proposed project or research idea. Grammatical errors, formatting problems--these things can be resolved later. Spend the early days of the proposal working through the bigger issues, and you'll find that the writing naturally becomes clearer, with many grammar issues resolving as it does.
Each proposal you work on will be a little different. Some proposals will have a very short turnaround, and you'll need to condense the process into two stages: a rough draft and a final draft. Others will be more layered, with the proposal assembled in stages, with a complete draft assembled only at the final stage. What is certain is that there will be multiple drafts and issues, so plan for what you can and add a significant buffer to your proposal schedule to accommodate the unexpected!