Summing It All Up
At the end of your proposal, clearly sum it all up for the reader. The summary should usually be no more than one or two paragraphs and should include …
• A moving argument for funding your proposal stated differently from elsewhere in the proposal (which includes both needs and the results).
• A restatement of the amount of the grant you’re requesting.
• A thank you for considering your proposal.
This is where you want the reader to hear the violins soar and see the cowboy ride off into the sunset. This is your big ending. Make it a good one. Here’s an example:
Life in a shelter for homeless families is especially hard on the children. Going to school provides some respite, but often the school day simply exchanges one institutional environment for another. Music for Kids will ensure that for at least three hours each week, as many as 60 kids living in these shelters will be taken out of the institutional environment and out of themselves through music.
Individual and small group instruction will provide much-needed personal attention, and group singing will encourage community and cooperation. Such simple activities have an enormous potential to assist these young people, as has been shown in the recent study by Urban Educators Conference. Thank you for considering our $20,000 grant request. It will make all this possible for these lost citizens of our city.
A common question is “how long should the proposal be?” Without being facetious, the answer is “as long as it needs to be.” Some funders impose limits on length (as little as 3 pages), but I’ve written 15-page proposals that (at least to me) didn’t seem long. The important thing is to stay focused on the project and avoid any tangents. If the proposal will be more than five pages, you might want to include a table of contents, and you’ll definitely want section headers to help the funder’s staff skim through to find particular information.
The Least You Need to Know
• If you can’t sum up a project in one persuasive sentence, you don’t understand it well enough to write a proposal.
• Making a clear case for supporting your charity includes information on what problems you seek to solve, how you will solve them, who will work on the project, and most importantly, who will benefit from it.
• Proposals that focus on your clients’ or constituents’ needs are stronger than those that stress the needs of your nonprofit.
• Take into consideration who will be reading your proposal when deciding how technical you can be in describing how you will carry it out.
• Use concrete methods for evaluating a program you know you will be able to include in your report to the funder.
• Use a moving closing section to reinforce the key points in the proposal and repeat “the ask.”
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