When you come across a funding opportunity that looks like it is a good fit, it can be tempting to start work on it immediately, especially if the deadline is only a few weeks away. But jumping into the writing phase without first reading through the solicitation carefully is always risky.

After working on many proposal teams of differing sizes on proposals of varying complexity, we’ve found that there are five things that consistently help a team function well together and produce the strongest proposal.

To assemble a grant proposal, even if your organization is small and most grant applications you submit are short, you'll still need some tools to organize the process, communicate with colleagues, and package and submit the proposal. The tools below are ones you should consider adding to your toolkit.

Even for a "simple" proposal, there will be multiple people contributing to the different pieces, with some working on the budget, others writing the more technical pieces, and still others wrangling together the supporting materials. If you are lucky, you'll also have an editor on your team who can copyedit the proposal at the final stage. Below are four things you can do to make the proposal process easier when there are several writers involved:

After you identify an opportunity to respond to, you'll want to prepare a proposal binder to organize your materials. You may want to prepare several copies of the binder, one for each member of the proposal team.  The contents of the binder will vary depending on how complicated the proposal is. However, there is some standard information you'll want to include in each proposal binder.

Once you've identified an opportunity to respond to and started to assemble your materials, you'll need to recruit a team to work on the proposal. If you've been anticipating an opportunity's release, you may already have your team in place. If this is the case, you can go directly to assembling your proposal binders and scheduling the initial proposal planning meeting.

In this post, we'll cover two more essential pieces of the proposal management process. The first is to create a template or proposal "shell" for the drafting process. The second piece we'll review is some of the tools you can use to manage the draft  process and keep team members informed of changes to the proposal schedule and proposal development process.

Writing a grant proposal is rarely, if ever, a solo activity. Unless you are starting a nonprofit on your own and trying to land that first grant, preparing a grant involves multiple people. The proposal team could be configured different ways: You might have several people writing content, or maybe one person doing the bulk of the writing and a handful of people involved as reviewers. Either way, more than one person will be involved. All of these individuals require coordination.

For some funding opportunities, you may need to hire a consultant to prepare the proposal. The consultant may be a subject-matter expert who can work with you on strategy, a grant writer who can write the content and manage the proposal process, or a former government or foundation staff member who can help with the review process and ensure that your proposal is responsive to the funder’s needs.

For many funding opportunities, particularly Request for Applications (RFAs) released by government agencies, you’ll have roughly six weeks to prepare and submit your response. With this six-week period in mind, you can create a proposal development plan that consists of a general timeline of draft due dates and review periods. Once you have a general outline for 6-week proposal process in place, you can then adjust it as needed for opportunities that have shorter or longer time horizons.