Writing That Works, 3e_ How to Communicate Effectively in Business - Kenneth Roman [43]
2. Show how your project meets their needs
Most funding sources have published the goals and criteria against which they make their decisions. Your opening paragraph should show that you understand this — and how your project fits. Here is the first paragraph of a proposal from the National Organization on Disability to a foundation that focuses its funds on supporting community programs:
The Community Partnership Program is N.O.D.’s flagship program, supporting a network of 4,500 communities around the United States. This voluntary network brings together citizens with and without disabilities in many significant community-building activities. It is our belief that American communities have the ingenuity and initiative to address disability issues directly at the grassroots level.
Be realistic in what you hope to accomplish. Better to identify a single specific problem that you might actually solve than to appear to be trying to cure all the ills of society.
Regardless of the outcome you promise, your own credibility is important. How long have you been around? What is your track record? It’s not enough just to establish the importance of your project. You must persuade your reader that you can make it happen.
3. Organize to persuade
Many proposals make life easier for the decision maker — they are easy to turn down because their authors don’t organize their material persuasively. Typically there are a series of points, often numbered to give the appearance of structure. But the proposal doesn’t relate the points to one another or fit them together to make a case. Claims are not supported by evidence. Facts, while impressive in themselves, don’t bear on the argument.
Organizing material to make a persuasive case calls for logic, rigor, and discipline. It is often the hardest part of writing, and bedevils every writer engaged in advocacy of any kind. Many of the changes from draft to draft of this book resulted from a struggle to connect examples precisely to the points they illustrate. We had to force ourselves to throw out a lot of good writing that was not quite relevant.
Everything relevant, nothing extraneous — that should be your goal in writing your proposal. To the extent you succeed, your proposal will rise above your competitors’ for that all too limited pot of money.
4. Make it urgent
The thought that must be communicated is that the project might not happen if there is no funding. “You can make the difference,” is one way to get a “yes.”
The introduction of a proposal by the National Academy Foundation identified the urgent need for an educated workforce to participate in the advancement of the U.S. economy in an increasingly global marketplace.
A review of recent educational findings reveals that we are far from developing such a workforce or even one on parity with that of other industrialized nations. For example, we find that American schoolchildren are typically found at the bottom of international comparisons of mathematics and science, and the majority of students seeking Ph.D. degrees in mathematics and engineering from American universities are from foreign countries.
For continuing programs, it is important to present a plan that will assure some kind of continuing support after the grant runs out — so the program doesn’t die.
5. Improve your product
While a well-written proposal is important, what really counts is a strong, viable program. Applicants for grants are offering us an opportunity, says Karen Rosa of the Altman Foundation. “We want to know who they are, what they do, and for renewal requests, did they do what they said they would do.”
A proposal from the Brooklyn Youth Chorus gets high marks because it describes a carefully constructed program and captures the essence of the chorus through impressive statistics and heartwarming photos of the kids. The covering