How to write a winning grant application

For development professionals, one of the core challenges is getting money to deliver projects. One of the best ways to do that is to apply for grants. Applying for grants makes the best use of your time when your applications are successful. And in order to be successful, you need to write a strong application that engages the donor. But how? What are some core principles to make sure your grant application stands out from the crowd? Every time I write, review or edit funding applications, four words guide my process: explicit, specific, concise, and precise. These words put the donor top of mind as you write, making it easier to write a grant that engages the donor. Remember: the donor wants to fund you. The role of a funding application is to show donors, as clearly as possible, how their funding aligns with your work, to allow them to say yes. Be explicit about what your project is going to do. Spell it out. Name the thing. Don’t hide behind obtuse phrasing or jargon. This is particularly true in the early stages of the application, where you should lay out the project plan so they can picture it in their mind. You must give absolutely clear information about: • The project summary: Outline the big picture view of what you plan to do. • The target population: Be explicit about who you are serving. • Community engagement: Explain how engagement tells you this is the best approach. • Program planning: Lay out why this is the most effective approach, based on the evidence. Write about how this program or project plan aligns with the high-level strategic funding goals of the donor. Adapt the language the donor used in their request for proposals, or RFP, that is explicitly relevant to the program or project strategy. This will begin to set the alignment between the application and the funder. The donor does not want to guess at what you plan on doing; the donor wants to know. Engage their curiosity, trust that the donor is on your side, and that they are looking for ways in which the proposal meets their strategic giving goals. Be specific about how you're going to do the work. Specific gets funded. Vague leaves the donor guessing. Specificity creates trust; confusion repels it. Do you want a donor to trust that this project you are pitching is viable and funding is necessary? If so, answer this question: What's the one practical thing that has to happen for the project goal you want to achieve to become true? And in order to achieve that, who will do what, when, why, how and for whom? The specific how of your approach is where your organization shines. How you do things, and how they are aligned with the donor, is the clue here. It differentiates you from others in the competitive grants process. Once again, use the language from the questions in the donor’s RFP to guide you to write specific answers. The biggest mistake I see in funding applications I review is that nonprofits ignore the language of the question being asked, instead going down a road where they talk all about the project, without specifically answering the question. Be concise. Do not bury the lede (my personal pet peeve!). This advice is for the meat of the application, in the sections where you go into greater detail about your project or program implementation. Your first sentence, aka the lede, should immediately inform reviewers of the implementation plan. You often have a limited word count. Reviewers are scanning to find relevant information — make it easy by having the first sentence concisely describe what you intend to do. Get to the point, right away, without a bunch of preceding qualifier sentences. For example, there may be a lot of evidence to support why your approach is the most feasible or effective. Do not waste the word count detailing the evidence. The first sentence could state how your implementation approach is informed by a body of evidence. Summarize the evidence in 50-75 words, or about two to three sentences, and then dive right into the design of your intervention based on that evidence. The donor is smart; it is very likely they already know quite a lot about the issues they fund. They don’t need a lot of explanation on the importance of an issue. They know it’s important — that’s why it’s a part of their giving strategy. What they fund is solutions. Be concise in describing your solution, and how it aligns with their giving strategy. Be precise. Have a good budget; know your timeline; and have clear, easy-to-understand objectives and outcomes, preferably mapped out in a logframe. I often recommend writing the logframe before you write the narrative. The compact layout of a logframe forces precise wording and sticking to the topic at hand. A well-planned logframe is your best tool when writing, because you can build your narrative around it, instead of searching through your narrative to find the tidbits to cut-and-paste into the logframe at the end of the process. Again, use RFP language to guide you as you write the logframe and the narrative. If the donor uses words that are different, but the meaning is aligned, use donor words. If you find your narrative veering off the course you laid out in a logframe point (think of logframe points as headings and subheadings), that is your clue to edit. Headings and subheads act as style guides — each head or subhead only requires a few sentences. A bonus in using RFP language is that it is repeated in narrative and logframe, once again making it easy for the donor to make connections. Don’t forget about the monitoring and evaluation plan, even if it’s brief. Choose a few indicators related to the project outcomes you know you can easily measure, including some that the donor is specifically interested in. Funders want to know that their funding brings actual change, not just what you say it will. You need to measure success and communicate that success to the funder. Measuring does three things: it embeds accountability into your plan for future donor reporting, it creates a monitoring and evaluation rhythm in your own organization, and it sets you up for future funding asks because you’ve got the data to back up your successes and ongoing needs. Every grant application you write, and every time you write one, will flow much more easily, and make sense to a potential funder, if you are explicit, specific, precise and concise.