Grant Guru

Grant activities are what you do to reach project goals. Well-designed projects have specific objectives that grantees interpret into the who, what, when, where, why and how of the proposal. Request for Proposals (RFPs) usually ask for a detailed plan of action or action plan. The action plan provides the grantor a blueprint of what you, the grantee will do, and when you will do it. We have already discussed how objectives are the steps toward achieving the goals of the project. Now, your job as grantwriter is to figure out how you will achieve each objective through your grant activities. These plans need to be detailed enough to help the reader understand that you have thought through the steps you will follow. On the other hand, these activities need to be concise enough so that you don't go over your narrative's page limit as specified in the RFP or promise more than you can deliver.

Each part of your plan, each activity, is best stated along with information about who is responsible for caring out the task. These action steps often add additional tasks for the people you work with. Before expanding other people's daily responsibilities, it is good practice to bring in high-level administration early on in your project design. In some cases, grant funding may pay for additional help or extra duty pay for current employees. Seek guidance on how to proceed so that you build ownership and community for your project. The culture and readiness of your particular situation will help you determine if this kind of potential change is even possible. Having the perspective of others up-front will save you grief down the road.

Murphy's laws will prevail. Nearly everything you plan to do will take longer than you think. Nothing will be as easy as it looks. And every solution will breed new problems. Although Murphy's laws may be credited to events at Edwards Air Force Base in 1949, perhaps, or attributed to one of many other theories, the meaning is not lost here. When you write grants, you have a tendency to throw in as much as possible to build an exemplary solution set for the grantor. In doing so, you must keep asking yourself, will we have time to do this? How long will this activity take? What steps do I take if my actions create unplanned for reactions?

The RFP will guide you as to whether your action plan, persons responsible and timeframe go in separate sections or if you can combine them. When allowed, I like to create a table or a grid. This is an efficient way to communicate a great deal of information in a short amount of space. Grids or tables work well because it helps break-up the narrative for the reader. If the grid is particularly complex, turning the page into landscape-mode works well (along with the entire grant), as long as the RFP allows this. Be sure to read the RFP carefully, some RFPs are very prescriptive, even delineating the size of fonts you are allowed to use in a table. Some RFPs may forbid color graphs and charts. Remember that you have a variety of ways to display information in black-and-white, gray-scale shading, and fonts. Make sure that your grantor can easily photocopy your proposal easily. Particularly when using shading, keep it to a light shade so that it is presentable after photocopied.

Some processes you may describe just don't work well in a grid. Steps to show continuous planning and improvement cycles are often times better served by diagram. Diagrams lend themselves to circular processes. Whether you choose to use grids or diagrams, do so when they condense your text and make it easier for the reader to see what you are trying to accomplish.

The activities you select are best described in terms of students, teachers, and other project participants. As you write your activities, if space permits, give the reader a word picture of what kids will do. This is particularly important for an educational grant. Keep your activities aligned and presented in the order that you have presented your goals and objectives. Keeping this parallel structure throughout your proposal will help the reader better understand your ideas. Next week, we will look at your proposal's evaluation plan. It will be no surprise to you that we continue the same parallel structure.