8 tips for writing a strong grant application

Generally, a grant proposal outlines a project idea, explains why your organization needs grant money, and provides evidence that demonstrates the worthiness of your project.

In grant proposals, you will describe your organization’s mission, describe how you plan to use grant funds, provide program goals and objectives, a timeline for completion of the project, and an expected outcome.

However, a grant proposal must also be written in such a way as to convince potential funders of the value and impact of your project.

At LaBarbera Learning Solutions, we’ve helped our clients write several successful grant proposals. In this guide, we’ll share with you 8 tips we’ve learned about what it takes to create a winning proposal.

8 tips for writing a strong grant application

1. Start with a strong cover letter
2. Write a short executive summary
3. Introduce your organization
4. Write a direct problem statement
5. State your goals and objectives
6. Project design: Discuss your methods and strategies
7. Evaluation: Discuss how you’ll track success (program evaluation)
8. Develop a project budget

Tip 1: Start with a strong cover letter

Your cover letter is the perfect opportunity to capture the funder’s attention and get your foot in the door.

The key objective of your cover letter is to compel the reader to get to the rest of the proposal.

Suggestions:

• Keep it short. Three to four paragraphs max. Get to the point quickly and state your intentions right away. You don’t need much fluff here.
• Say what you need. At the very beginning, mention how much money you need and what you want it for. Don’t be afraid to be direct – you deserve this grant, and you want the reader to know it.
• Avoid repeating yourself. You don’t need to recap the proposal in the cover letter. You can go a little off-course and provide something of value here.
• Make a clear connection. Show that you understand the funder and make a clear line from their mission and funds to your proposed project. Don’t make the funder guess or make their own connections.

Tip 2: Write your executive summary

Every winning grant should start with a brief executive summary, which is essentially a brief synopsis of the entire proposal. Here, you will introduce your business, the proposal, and your project’s goals – essentially your grant request.

Provide enough detail and specifics. Get to the point quickly and be factual.

Suggestions:

• Limit the summary to two pages. Provide just enough information so the reader can read just this part and get a clear idea of who you are and what you need the money for.
• Introduce your organization. Although you will go into detail about this later, don’t be afraid to summarize for the reader your organization’s history, mission, and objectives.
• Consider answering these questions in your executive summary:
• What is your mission and history? What do you do?
• What is your project’s name and who is it supposed to help?
• What problem are you solving and why should it matter?
• What is your end goal and how will you measure whether you achieved it?
• Why should you get the funds? What are your competencies?
• How much money do you need and how do you plan to finance the project in the future? Do you have other funding sources?

Tip 3: Introduce your organization

Now that you’ve set the stage for the entire proposal, you can share more details here about your infrastructure, history, mission, experience, etc.

Here you include a biography of key staff, your business track record (success stories), company goals, and philosophy. This is where you can highlight your expertise.

Client recommendations, letters of thanks, and feedback from customers or the general public are things you could include in your grant proposal.

It is important to show that your organization has the capacity and the ability to meet all deliverables from an execution perspective and also meet all legal, safety, and quality obligations.

Suggestions:

• Be objective. Stay factual here, and avoid patting yourself on the back a little too much.
• Provide a backstory. When was the organization started and why? Try to connect your mission to that of the grantmaker as much as possible in a natural way.

Tip 4: Write a direct problem statement

One of the most important parts of the grant proposal structure is the problem statement, also known as the “needs statement.” This is where you explain why your community has a problem and how you or your organization can provide the solution.

In a winning grant proposal, the problem statement will heavily rely on quantitative data and clearly display how your organization answers a need.

Suggestions:

• Use comparable data. Grant makers want to see results from other communities that already implemented a solution like yours and got satisfactory outcomes.
• Highlight urgency. Underline the importance that this project starts now rather than later.
• Focus on the main problem. Try not to get sidetracked by other phenomena that might contribute to the key problem you’re addressing.

Tip 5: State your goals and objectives

Another very important part of the grant proposal process is clearly stating your goals and objectives.

In fact, a significant number of proposals fail because they forget or mishandle this step, so all their hard work goes to waste!

Write details about the desired outcomes of your project and how you will measure success.

(Need help developing and measuring outcomes? The independent evaluators at LaBarbera Learning Solutions are the experts who can help you get the grant and show funders how you’re putting their money to good use.)

This section is key to providing information on the benefits that the grantee, community, government, or client will see for their investment.

Suggestions:

• State objectives as outcomes. An objective is something you want to achieve, not do. Many organizations confuse these terms.
• Make objectives SMART. Make sure you can track progress by making objectives Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound.
• Connect goals and objectives to the audience. The final result of your project should always be the betterment of your community expressed in a measurable way.

Tip 6: Project design: Methods and strategies

This is where you tell the funding agency how you plan on achieving the goals and objectives you detailed in the previous section.

List what you’ll need (facilities, staff, support services) to deliver the project and achieve the defined measures for success.

Suggestions:

• Connect closely to objectives. Your methods and strategies need to be connected to the objected you outlined, as well as the needs statement. Make it very clear how they are all connected.
• Provide examples. If possible, share examples of when these same methods worked for previous projects.
• Demonstrate cost effectiveness. Make sure the grant maker realizes that your methods are rational, well-researched, and cost-effective.

Tip 7: The evaluation section: tracking success

This section covers program evaluation — how will you track your program’s progress?

It also includes the timeframe needed for program evaluation and who will do the evaluation including the specific skills or products needed and the cost of the evaluation phase of the project.

This is one of the most important steps to writing a grant proposal, as all funders will look for program evaluations.

Many times, funders desire that you hire an independent evaluator—someone who does not work for your company, who can be objective and who is skilled at measuring progress toward desired outcomes.

(Program evaluation is what LaBarbera Learning Solutions does best. Find out more.)

Whether we’re talking about government agencies or private foundations, funders need to know if the program they invested in made a difference and that their money was put to good use.

Evaluations can seem expensive, but this step in the process is absolutely worth it. You can build it into the grant budget, however, so this would not be an out-of-pocket expense.

Suggestions:

• Obtain feedback. However you image your evaluation process, it should include feedback from the community taking part in the project. Those who benefit from your services are crucial in the evaluation process.
• Decide between internal or external evaluation. One of the most important variables is whether you’ll employ your own staff or hire an external agency to do an independent evaluation. Make sure you know what the funding agency requires. (Many times government grantors require an outside/independent evaluator, or they give “priority funding” to organizations who include an independent evaluator in their proposal).

Tip 8: Outline a project budget

One of the most important grant proposal topics is budgeting. This is the moment when you go into detail about exactly how you’ll be using the resources you’re requesting.

Remember that the project budget section is the true meat of your grant proposal. And remember that you can build the cost of an independent evaluator into the budget.

Suggestions:

• Pay attention to detail. Everything needs to be covered. Travel, supplies, advertising, personnel, evaluation—don’t leave anything out. If you forget something, you can’t add it in later or request anything additional.
• Double-check. It is easy to leave out a zero or move a decimal point and distort everything by accident. (We recently miscalculated our hourly rate on several line items in a client’s budget, leaving a considerable gap in the bottom line. We had to “eat” the gap in income because of our mistake.)

If you find yourself in need of additional help writing a grant proposal after reading this guide, click here. If you want to learn more about our program evaluation services, click here. Or even if you think you could benefit from another set of eyes to review your grant proposal before pressing “send,” we can help with that too (click here).

Grant Writing Consulting is just one of the many services we offer.