Author: Jayme Sokolow

Government grant proposals should go through a five-step writing process:

• Plan: Think through your proposal sections.
• Organize: Use the grant guidelines as your outlining guide.
• Write: Write in a free-flowing manner.
• Examine: Walk away from your writing and review it later while letting others review it too.
• Revise: Emphasize clarity, conciseness, correctness, and persuasiveness.

This posting, part one in a series, will discuss the first two steps:

PLANNING YOUR GOV’T GRANT PROPOSAL

Proposal writers should take three simple-but-effective steps to plan their writing assignments: (1) define common terms – the government agency’s terms and your own; (2) use a planning worksheet to outline your sections; and (3) seek feedback early in the process.

Define common terms

• What are the features (details) of your service?
• What are the benefits of your service?
• What benefits are important to the evaluators?

Develop a planning worksheet

Your planning worksheet should help you identify the government agency’s main issues, your solution, your experience and your performance.

Seek feedback early

Remember, you are part of a team! Use your colleagues to review your planning sheet and suggest improvements. This can be accomplished at a brainstorming session or through an individual review of your worksheet.

If your planning process has gone well, every one of the proposal writers should have a detailed planning worksheet before they begin writing. Please note the emphasis on the word “before.”

Too many proposals are written prematurely before the proposal team has carefully thought through what they are planning to present. If you write before you plan, you are very unlikely to develop a competitive proposal.

Resist the very human urge to start writing once you have read the grant guidelines. Step away from the computer keyboard! You must have a substantive outline before you write, and that can only be done through careful planning.

ORGANIZING YOUR GOV’T GRANT PROPOSAL

Proposal writers should take three simple but effective steps to organize their writing assignments: (1) follow the fundamentals of persuasive organization; (2) organize as instructed; and (3) organize around government agency’s hot buttons.

Follow the fundamentals of persuasive organization

• Present information according to the government agency’s needs. Focus on providing a solution to the agency’s problem, listing benefits and evidence/proof.
• Group similar ideas together.
• Place the most important information first.
• Keep introductions short.
• Use headings to guide evaluators.

Organize as instructed

Follow the grant guidelines carefully when organizing your proposal narrative. Do not create your own outline – follow the grant guidelines literally.

Organize around the customer/evaluator hot buttons

• Acknowledge the government agency’s vision, challenges, objectives, and requirements.
• Establish and prioritize the government agency’s needs and desired outcomes (hot buttons).
• Present details of your solution in the same order as your prioritization of the government agency’s needs and desired outcomes. Emphasize the benefits to the government of your solution and provide proof that your solution is very likely to work.

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Dr. Jayme Sokolow, founder and president of The Development Source, Inc.,
helps nonprofit organizations develop successful proposals to government agencies. <a href=”mailto:JSoko12481@aol.com”>Contact Jayme Sokolow</a>.

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<strong>If you would like to comment/expand on the above, or would just like to offer your thoughts on the subject of this posting, we encourage you to “Leave a Reply” at the bottom of this page, click on the feedback link at the top of the page, or send an email to the author of this posting.</strong>

Until recently, most government grant proposals were developed in a defined physical space. The proposal team worked near each other, had frequent face-to-face contact, and used conference rooms in its work.

The New Virtual World of Grant Proposal Construction

Today, however, this traditional model of proposal development is rapidly changing. An increasing number of government grant proposals are virtual efforts – they involve a geographically dispersed proposal team that works and communicates (for the most part) electronically, rather than on a face-to-face basis.

Virtual proposal managers must ask themselves (and answer) four basic questions:
 1.  How can I provide support to a geographically dispersed team?
 2.  How can I distribute information, documents, and tools?
 3.  How can I provide training and support to people whom I have not met?
 4.  How do I produce and submit the proposal?

How can I provide support to a geographically dispersed team?
Besides plenty of e-mails, telephone calls, and conference calls, a proposal manager should establish an electronic site where proposal team members can upload, download, and review proposal documents. Many organizations have SharePoint already in place, which is easy to use, access, and administer. It is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It also provides the security you need to work remotely.

How can I distribute information, documents, and tools?
As the proposal manager, you can use SharePoint to post documents such as resumes, past performance write-ups, drafts, and templates to team members.

How can I provide training and support to people whom I have not met?
Using SharePoint, you can post training videos, instructional materials, your organization’s style manual, and other documents.

How do I produce and submit the proposal?
Nowadays, most government grant proposals are submitted electronically. At the very beginning of the proposal effort, you should arrange to produce and upload your final proposal. If you wait until the last minute, you risk torpedoing the entire proposal because there are often problems uploading proposals, especially to government agencies using their own Web sites.

Answer these four questions before the proposal effort begins, and you will avoid a great deal of unproductive, low-level administrative and repetitive work in the expanding world of virtual grant proposals.

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Dr. Jayme Sokolow, founder and president of The Development Source, Inc.,
helps nonprofit organizations develop successful proposals to government agencies. Contact Jayme Sokolow.

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If you would like to comment/expand on the above, or would just like to offer your thoughts on the subject of this posting, we encourage you to “Leave a Reply” at the bottom of this page, click on the feedback link at the top of the page, or send an email to the author of this posting.

One of the most precious commodities in any government grant proposal effort is the amount of time you have to conceptualize, develop, produce, and deliver your proposal. For many nonprofit organizations, time slips away too easily.

Phases of Grant Proposal Development

There is a good four-phase rule-of-thumb that can be applied to grants, each phase representing 25 percent of the needed time:
 •  Phase I: grant guidelines analysis, proposal strategizing, planning, and outlining.
 •  Phase II: proposal writing and illustration.
 •  Phase III: proposal review and revision.
 •  Phase IV: proposal finalization, edit, packaging, and delivery.

Address the Problem of Slippage
There is usually, however, some slippage from one phase to another and, to address the problem of slippage, I recommend that you do the following:
 •  Do some tasks in Phase I before the release of the grant guidelines.
 •  Do some tasks more quickly.
 •  Add more proposal staff to do the work, if possible.
 •  Overlap tasks so that they can be done simultaneously rather than serially.

If you have to cut corners, there are three realistic steps that you should take:
 First, you can group tasks into one of three categories:
   (1) Tasks that must be done;
   (2) Tasks that would be good to do; and,
   (3) Tasks that are not likely to have an impact on the proposal.
 Limit yourself to the most important tasks with the greatest payoff.

 Second, schedule proposal tasks in parallel rather than in sequence to save time.

 And third, relentlessly focus on milestones and delivery.

Whatever your time constraints, scheduling a grants proposal and finding ways to reach milestones is one of the most important roles of a Proposal Manager. Use the schedule to organize and complete your most essential activities, and if the schedule slips, find ways to finish the essential tasks well to submit a competitive grant application.

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Dr. Jayme Sokolow, founder and president of The Development Source, Inc.,
helps nonprofit organizations develop successful proposals to government agencies. Contact Jayme Sokolow.

Developing a grant proposal to a government agency is a risky undertaking. However, there are predictable risks that you should anticipate and address. If you do not address them at the beginning of your effort, your may have trouble submitting a competitive grant proposal by the deadline.

Risks and How to Address Them
Below are the four most common risks and strategies for addressing them.

1. Insufficient Information about the Government Agency
•  Conduct electronic research about the government agency
•  Engage the government agency outside the office at professional meetings, conferences,
and other venues
•  Use ethical and reliable people and legitimate sources to provide more information and
insight about the government agency

2. Tight Schedule
•  Create a schedule that works backward from the deadline to the kick-off meeting
•  Build time into the schedule for delays and other problems
•  Get the resources you need to meet the deadline

3. Scarce Resources
•  Establish a realistic proposal development budget
•  Identify and secure needed resources to do the proposal well, from equipment to people
•  Use consultants when necessary to bolster your proposal team

4. Incompetent and/or Delusional Senior Management and Colleagues
•  Use a solid bid/no bid process to reject grant opportunities that you have little or no
chance of winning
•  Create a plan to address major risks
•  Provide sufficient time within your schedule to resolve difficulties and bottlenecks
•  Maintain a good sense of humor and a stoical attitude about the proposal effort

Risks are common and predictable when you develop government grant proposals. Anticipate them and you will be more successful.

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Dr. Jayme Sokolow, founder and president of The Development Source, Inc.,
helps nonprofit organizations develop successful proposals to government agencies. Contact Jayme Sokolow.

An Executive Summary must be compelling and persuasive, as it introduces your narrative and provides a roadmap for reviewers. If it isn’t, reviewers will likely not pay much attention to the rest of your proposal.

Writers of good Executive Summaries avoid four common mistakes:

#1: Poorly written Executive Summaries very often begin with some flowery language about how pleased you are to submit this terrific proposal, and how you look forward to its review. These summaries tend to be very general, contain far too much marketing hype about the wonderfulness of your organization, and usually don’t focus on the needs of the government agency.

#2: Hastily written Executive Summaries, especially those written at the last minute, do not allow for proper review and rewriting. You need time to think, polish, and refine. This cannot be done at 2 A.M. the morning of the proposal deadline.

#3: Not addressing how you plan to carry out the contract is THE major mistake. Your Executive Summary must answer two important questions: Why am I bidding? What am I offering the government agency? It is, of course, important to discuss the positive qualities and services of your organization, but not to the extent of glossing over what the gov’t agency really wants to know.

#4: Bad Executive Summaries are dry and boring, and suggest to the reviewer that there is more of the same in the rest of the proposal. Your Executive Summary is a short sales pitch. Your challenge is to hook your reviewers and engage them in the rest of your narrative. You do that by demonstrating, in a relatively few paragraphs, that you have something special to offer the government agency.

This “introduction” to your proposal is too important to treat lightly. A well written Executive Summary should get the proposal reviewer to want to read your entire proposal.
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Dr. Jayme Sokolow, founder and president of The Development Source, Inc.,
helps nonprofit organizations develop successful proposals to government agencies. Contact Jayme Sokolow.

A Simple Grant Proposal is Better….

When your grant proposal is being evaluated by a government agency, reviewers rely on a mental toolbox of rapid and simple techniques to score your application. How you write/design the proposal must be as persuasive as possible, and must help reviewers gather information quickly and effortlessly.

Use the principles of Good Information Design to help reviewers quickly find the information that interests them:

• Instead of the boxy, justified look, make your proposal attractive-to-the-eye
by using a left-justification with “ragged-right.” Add lists, graphics, tables and other visuals.
Use headers and footers, and headings that stand out.

• Organize your proposal to reflect the grant guidelines or the evaluation criteria and,
especially, by using the vocabulary of the grant guidelines to label proposal
sections and headings.

• Show how your proposal will be structured … by including an Executive Summary, a Table of
Contents, frequent headings, and topic sentences at the beginning of paragraphs.

• Make it easy for the reviewer to navigate the proposal by using page and section numbers
and letters, headers, footers, and chapter and section titles.

• Create a proposal that reads easily, by breaking your narrative into manageable chunks of
information and by having related chunks of information grouped together.

• Show the importance of blocks of information by using different font sizes, font weights,
indentations, and numbering/lettering systems.

• Differentiate information types with themes, section summaries, lists, captions, sidebars,
and visuals.

Reviewers of your grant proposal are evaluating many grant applications besides yours. Make it as easy and effortless as possible for them.
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Dr. Jayme Sokolow, founder and president of The Development Source, Inc.,
helps nonprofit organizations develop successful proposals to government agencies. Contact Jayme Sokolow.

Clear/concise writing is an important component of the government grant proposal development process. But, as John C. Lauderdale – the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Getting Government Contracts (2009) – points out, there are some tried and true maxims that you should follow to write well.

Two of those maxims are:

• Proposal quality is greatly improved by a structured, disciplined review of the writing process.
• No one should ever say, “My work is so good that it does not need to be reviewed by anyone else.”

Critical Steps in Government Grant Writing

A good way to address those “rules” is to follow these simple but critical steps:

1: Outline your proposal first. This should be based on the instructions in the grant guidelines. If there are no instructions about organizing your narrative, use the evaluation criteria to create your outline.

2: Review your outline.

3: Revise your outline.

4: Have your outline reviewed by others and approved.

5: Begin identifying good graphics/visuals to support your outline. Good graphics increase understanding and enable reviewers to understand your main points quickly and effortlessly. For example, if you are writing about a growing increase in the number of people using your services, include a bar graph depicting this increase over the years.

6: Write your narrative.

7: Have your writing reviewed by others. Your best reviewer may be someone who knows the subject of your application well but who has not been involved in developing the proposal.

8: Revise what you’ve written.

9: Receive constructive advice about your revision.

10: Rewrite and review again.

Good government grant proposal writing is a repetitive process that should include plenty of revision, and it involves stepping back from your keyboard as much as it involves writing.

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Dr. Jayme Sokolow, founder and president of The Development Source, Inc., helps nonprofit organizations develop successful proposals to government agencies. Contact Jayme Sokolow.

Being able to tell a convincing story is an important issue for anyone working on a government grant proposal; but, sadly, too many proposals tell no story. Proposals may contain plenty of information, but they must also incorporate a cohesive story line that unifies the narrative.

What is a Powerful Story?
According to Jennifer Aaker, a well-known author and business school professor at Stanford University, powerful stories can be a great asset. As Aaker illustrates, a well-told story can become a powerful tool for advocacy and persuasion.

“Tell me the facts and I’ll learn.
Tell me the truth and I’ll believe.
But tell me a story, and it will live in my heart forever.”

In our grant proposals, we are supposed to be clear and factual. There is no place for emotion and subjective thinking. But throughout human history, great stories have always inspired, motivated, moved, and persuaded others. The Bible – a collection of stories – is perhaps the best example of the incredible power of storytelling.

One of the books Aaker recommends to her students is Annette Simmons’ Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins (2007). Simmons recommends that you consider using these kinds of stories throughout your proposal:
  • Who I Am Stories: What lessons have your NPO’s experiences taught you?
  • Vision Stories: What is your NPO’s vision for the future?
  • Values-in-Action Stories: What programs of your NPO typify its values?
  • I-Know-What-You Are-Thinking Stories: What stories can you tell that
    will dispel the objections that reviewers might have about your proposed
    project? Good proposals dispel the element of risk or uncertainty which
    always unsettles reviewers.

Stories and Reviewers
The reviewers of your proposal are submerged in a deep ocean of data that may appear disconnected and overwhelming. They are reviewing many proposals, not just yours, and they may have trouble remembering one proposal from another.

In this choppy sea, meaningful stories can act as life preservers by enabling you to connect with them and create meaning in ways that no mere recitation of facts can accomplish. Stories help win reviewers over to your point of view, and help reviewers remember who you are and why your project is important.

The most powerful communications tool in human history has been and will remain the art of storytelling. We were entranced by good stories as children, and we still read them as adults.

Use effective stories to create meaning in your grant proposals, and you will be more successful.

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Dr. Jayme Sokolow, founder and president of The Development Source, Inc., helps nonprofit organizations develop successful proposals to government agencies. Contact Jayme Sokolow

Good government grant proposals tell a compelling story. To tell a compelling story you must have strong Win-Themes because they help reviewers understand why you can provide the best solution to the problem identified in the grant guidelines. When you start your proposal, first create your Win-Themes.

Developing compelling Win-Themes for your government grant proposal is not an easy process. It will involve several meetings with your proposal team and plenty of brainstorming. However, the results will justify the effort because your Win-Themes will provide overarching story lines for your entire proposal.

A Strong Win-Theme:
• Links your solution to the problem identified in the grant guidelines — a problem or a need that your project is supposed to address.
• Supports your solution by providing evidence that your program will help address the problem or need
• Provides reasons and proof that evaluators need to give you a high rating.

A Strong Win-Theme has Three Elements:
Features are characteristics or elements of your solution. They may be software or the number of key personnel, to use a few examples. They are the means to your end, not the end itself.

Benefits are advantages that solve the government agency’s problem or address a major concern. In grant proposals, they usually involve the provision of services. Benefits address the all-important “So What” question.

Proof is the evidence that demonstrates your solution is likely to work.

Creating Great Win-Themes
Step 1: State the basic problem or need identified in the grant guidelines. Example: Increase contraceptive use in Ethiopia.
Step 2: Add your features and benefits. Example: A social marketing campaign (feature) will increase contraceptive use by 5 percent over three years (benefit).
Step 3: Add proof. Example: The same campaign has been successfully implemented in Sudan and Kenya.

Now there’s a great Win-Theme: Our social marketing campaign will increase contraceptive use in Ethiopia by 5 percent over a three-year-period, as it already has done in Sudan and Kenya.

A terrible Win-Theme simply rehashes the grant guidelines and fails to answer the “So What?” question. A bad Win-Theme is all features and no benefits. A great Win-Theme combines features, benefits, and proof to frame your grant proposal.

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Dr. Jayme Sokolow, founder and president of The Development Source, Inc., helps nonprofit organizations develop successful proposals to government agencies. Contact Jayme Sokolow

The best way to begin a government grant proposal is with a great kick-off meeting. If the meeting goes well, you will inform, motivate, and focus the grant proposal team on the task ahead.

The proposal team is comprised of the people who will be working on the grant application. They should include the Proposal Manager, the grant writers, the subject matter experts, the accountant or Chief Financial Officer, and anyone who will be actively involved in putting together the grant proposal.

The Kick-Off Meeting is the first step in the process of developing your proposal. The best kick-off meetings involve the entire proposal team sitting face-to-face around a conference table. For efforts that involve partners around the country, a conference call will be more cost-effective and less time-consuming.

The Proposal Manager should run the kick-off meeting. Thorough preparation for that meeting includes:
• Creating a complete agenda for distribution at the meeting.
• Inviting the entire proposal team.
• Inviting senior management – the President, Vice President, and Chief
   Operating Officer. They should attend for two important reasons – to learn
   more about the proposal effort and to support the team.
• Arranging a comfortable setting, and, if the meeting is long, provide
   refreshments or a meal.
• Providing relevant materials in advance – such as the grant guidelines and
   the Application Instructions.
• Providing contact information about the proposal team.
• Describing the process and schedule. The schedule is very important
   because most proposal efforts operate on tight deadlines.
• Explaining why your effort is important is important to the NPO.
• Explaining how the proposal team will work together and in what roles.

Desired Outcomes of the Meeting
• Attendees should leave the room confident in your ability to steer the
   proposal effort as the Proposal Manager.
• They need to believe that the grant proposal has a good chance of being
   funded.
• Management should be committed to providing strong support and advice
   as needed.
• The proposal team should have a clear understanding of their individual roles.
• The proposal team should be committed to adhering to the schedule.

If you can accomplish these goals, you are off to a great start!
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Dr. Jayme Sokolow, founder and president of The Development Source, Inc.,
helps nonprofit organizations develop successful proposals to government agencies. Contact Jayme Sokolow.
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From this posting, until after Labor Day, the Fundraising Blog will post only once each week. We will resume the twice weekly postings in September. Enjoy your summer. ….Hank, Natalie, Jayme, Lynn, Rick & Bill