What are essential parts of a grant application template?
In Part 4 and final of the series in Writing Successful Grants, I share with you a superstructure template that I use to write grant applications and design program/projects. I have used this superstructure to teach university and college students how to write successful grants. Even though grantors have their own format for grant applications, you can increase your confidence and effectiveness as a grant writer by familiarizing yourself with the core parts of every application so that you can accelerate your research, program development, and writing. It can help you ask better questions of prospective grant writers you might want to hire. Email me star@mix-muse.com. Let me know if you’re in the Seattle area.
Grant Applications Can Be Read Non-Sequentially
Writing grants are unlike writing novels or short stories, which are intended to be read in the sequence provided, unless you skip to the end of a mystery to find out who did it! Accommodate this reading tendency by writing your application in parts, making each easy to find and read. Make all parts easy to understand no matter how evaluators read. Provide adequate context within each part of your application.
The order in which grantors’ questions appear, you write, and evaluators read are not the same. Your Summary may appear first but written last, after you’ve completed the entire grant application. Experienced grant evaluators may read, your Budget Table or Narrative first, even if it’s in the middle of the application. Write all your parts so they do not heavily rely on context provided by another part that precedes or proceeds it. Use labels, subheadings, titles, and repeat words across all parts in a similar fashion to build cohesion and readability.
A grant application superstructure consists of these 9 parts.
1. Application Summary or Executive Summary
Write a short overview of your entire grant application program/project. Include the outcomes and impact, and funds you’re requesting from the grantor. Include the resources that others will contribute. Your purpose is to be substantive, precise and concise. Distill your entire program/project into a shorter passage that conveys accurately what you are proposing to do, key benefits for investing in you, and what it takes to execute your program. Write the summary last, after you’ve completed the whole grant application. It is only then you actually know precisely what you need to say.
2. Write an Introduction to the Applicant
Describe your nonprofit organization. What are your values? Values are what you believe is fundamentally important or essential. What is your mission? A mission is what your organization currently does. What is your organization’s vision? A vision is how you picture what you do and your impact in the future.
Why does your organization do what it does? What makes your organization distinct? Establish your credibility. Explain why you can be trusted to steward the funds. Share your organization’s history, your success record, and why you’re a good match for the project described in the Call for Applications.
3. Write a Need/Problem Statement
Establish the need for your project. Who benefits from your project if it’s funded? People tell me they uncomfortable with the term “problem” because they want to stay upbeat and positive. Honestly, this is is unhelpful thinking when it comes to writing grants. The whole purpose of grant funding is to address problems of varying type and complexity. If you won’t use a direct, precise term such as “problem,” how will you write about your program as the solution?
State the consequences of not funding your project and the ways not funding your organization contributes to the needs continuing to being left unaddressed. Be factual, well-documented in your description. State what concerns and/or impassions you about the current problem or your proposed solution? State why the problem or your solution matters to you and how it could impact others. What is your time frame? Why is securing funding critical? Will you include a case study of a real beneficiary your organization has served? A real need for real people increases your specificity and application’s relatability and applicability.
These questions may help you set not just your strategy for writing a grant but program design.
Is your organization calling attention a problem?
Is your organization defining a problem?
Is your organization providing a solution to a problem?
Is your organization doing some combination of #1-3?
4. Write Your Project Goals and Outcomes
Make your goals and outcomes consistent with each other and your need/problem statement.
A goal is what you intend to achieve with your project. Define the goals of your program/project. Goals must be consistent with your statement of need/problem. How will you measure whether you have met your stated goals? How will you know when you’ve been successful? How do you know when your program/project is achieving the impact it wants?
An outcome is how activities of your program turn out. What are your desired outcomes for your program? Have both qualitative (story-based, anecdotes) and quantitive (measurable) outcomes. State the concrete, tangible measurable outcomes you expect your project will produce. In today’s competitive grant making space, measurable outcomes are expected. Performance-based funding is prevalent.
5. Write a Program Plan
How are you going to execute the project? Describe how you will achieve the goals and produce the outcomes. What will be your key activities? When will activities occur? How long will they take? Provide thorough details about all activities your program/project will do. Who will do what? When and how will they do it? These are your outputs.
6. Describe Your Capacity
Explain how your organization is preparing for your program/project. Do you have adequate, trained staff? Do you have a supportive Board of Directors, internal or external community? Do you have adequate space, facilities, equipment, and materials? What is your timeline for developing, planning, executing, and evaluating your program/project? Connect capacity information to your timeframe.
7. Write an Evaluation Plan
Even though you have not started, evaluators want to know now how you plan to evaluate your program/project’s success. How will you know you’ve achieved your goals? How will you track and measure whether activities are rolling out as planned? How will you know you’re succeeding and what will tell you that?What methodology will you use to evaluate your goals and measure your outcomes? Is your method of evaluation consistent with what you’ve described as your outcomes? Are your outcomes consistent with your need/problem statement?
8. Create a Realistic Project Budget
Create a thorough and realistic budget for your grant application. Include expense details as well as other sources of anticipated revenue—in addition to funds from the grantor. Is your organization contributing funds to the program/project? Do you have partners who are contributing resources? Resources may be funds, staffing, materials, equipment, and so forth. Some grantors stipulate the kind or amount of resources that may be applied from your partners or even your organization. Read carefully the Call for Applications.
9. Describe Your Grant Project’s Sustained Impact
While it may seem daunting, the grant application requires you to think ahead about long-term impacts. Grantors want to know how you will sustain benefits beyond the grantor’s initial investment. Do you need continuous funds or only a one-time undertaking? How will you continue to generate impact beyond the period of grant funding?
More documents: You may be required to include additional documents to your grant application, such as your organization’s 501(c)(3) letter from the Internal Revenue Service, your organization’s Form 990, a list of your Board Directors and their affiliations, your current operating budget, or Letters of Support from partner organizations. Make requests to partners and assemble such documents earlier. Ensure business documents are easy to locate.
