Introduction:
Study Guide for Grant Seeking in an Electronic Age

The Companion Website for Grant Seeking in an Electronic Age includes a short study guide for students to help you learn how to write winning proposals. Many people refer to the kinds of proposals presented in this book as grant proposals. We prefer to use the more generic term, proposal, because grant refers to the kind of award made as opposed to a type of proposal. The text is designed for students, faculty, and professionals from nonprofit organizations who write proposals to fund their research or other activities. In the text, we provide you with a systematic process for learning how to seek grants and write proposals.

Theoretical Grounding

Many proposal writing texts seem to us like a compendium of how-tos or a series of anecdotes because they lack conceptual integrity. When we think of the proposal writing process, we conceive of it differently: we see it as part of a larger grant seeking process grounded firmly in rhetorical theory. The theory gives us a framework to hang the practice on and provides us with a set of conceptual schemas for understanding the relationships between the parts of the process. Rhetorical theory acts as a lens, providing us with a particularly useful perspective on grant seeking. We conceptualize the grant seeking process as consisting of six steps:
  1. Identifying or recognizing a societal, community, or research problem

  2. Generating an idea to solve the problem

  3. Determining if the idea (your proposed solution) furthers the mission and goals of your organization or adds to the knowledge in a field

  4. Researching potential sponsors to find a match between your idea and the sponsors' priorities

  5. Designing, writing, and submitting a proposal which follows a particular sponsor's guidelines

  6. Getting funded! Implementing your solution to solve the problem and benefit the target population.

Steps 1-4 are all part of rhetorical invention or gathering the available means of persuasion. When we get to step 5, designing and writing the proposal, we move to arrangement and style. But what differentiates proposal writing from other types of writing is that the sponsor defines both the arrangement and the style. These are not selected by the proposal writer. If anything, the proposal writer has to comply exactly with the requirements laid down by the sponsor. In other words, the sponsor defines the form of the proposal. That form, however, need not be seen as restrictive, but rather as liberating! For example, when a poet decides to write a sonnet, he or she has to follow one of the traditional sonnet forms: usually 14 lines long, with a problem presented in the first eight lines and resolved in the last six, and an abab cdcd efef gg rhyme scheme. With the form given, the poet is free to concentrate on content, imagery, sound, sense, and so on. Likewise, with the form already defined, the proposal writer can concentrate on developing the content, inventing the arguments, and adapting information and arguments to the needs and interests of the audiences. We find these elements to be the creative aspects of proposal writing.

Many of the questions that we ask throughout the text help writers analyze the audience, define the problem, and invent the arguments that serve as the topoi of grant seeking and proposal writing. The entire process is persuasive in nature, and the process itself is a complex cognitive activity which includes a number of lower and higher order thinking skills. In the text we help you to practice these different skill sets so that you become proficient. The exercises in the chapters are designed to ask questions that model the process of thinking about grant seeking and gathering useful information at different stages of the grant seeking and proposal writing processes. The exercises also provide guided practice to increase skills proficiency while enhancing learning through a guided discovery process. For example, exercises designed to help you follow the sponsor's document design guidelines build more mechanical skills while exercises designed to help you match your project ideas to the sponsor's priorities build comparative analysis skills—both of which are necessary to become effective grant seekers. The skill sets that you practice throughout the process are iterative in the best sense of that word: they do not go around in circles on a flat plane like the worm Oroboros biting his tail, but they spiral upward increasing in complexity and depth, moving from identifying societal, community, or research problems to designing and developing solutions to those problems, to implementing the solutions and improving the conditions of the target population.

Challenges of Proposal Writing

Grant seeking and its sub-set, proposal writing, is a coherent process that one becomes proficient at by practicing a series of skills. This is an art, not a science. Proposal writing is a challenging for three reasons:
  1. Each proposal follows a particular sponsor's guidelines, so each one is different. Because of this, winning proposals can only be used as examples, not as models.

  2. Just because your proposal is accurate, complete, and well written does not make it a fundable proposal. For a proposal to be fundable, the project it proposes has to match the sponsor's priorities with the organization's strategic plan; it has to be targeted to the population the sponsor wants to help; it has to follow the guidelines exactly the way the sponsor presents them; and it has to convince the sponsor that your organization is the best one to conduct the project.

  3. Proposal writing is part of a larger process of grant seeking. If we try to learn just proposal writing, we take it out of the context of grant seeking. Once we do that, we cannot judge the effectiveness of the proposal as situated communication because we do not have the bases to judge it against, that is, all of the situational criteria mentioned in 2 above.
    4. The text and the Companion Website are designed to meet these challenges. If you are experienced in grant seeking and proposal writing, the Companion Website will provide reinforcement through chapter summaries, lists of keywords used in the chapters, and a series of downloadable exercises and peer review evaluation forms. The Companion Website will be useful to both experienced and novice writers because of the electronic notebook, as well as additional pertinent information and URLs to other grant seeking resources. Since government sponsors are moving more and more of their information online—from locating RFPs to submitting proposals to managing projects—we fully expect that the next edition of this text will concentrate even more heavily on electronic searches, submissions, and grants management.

Overview of the Companion Website for Students

The Companion Website for students consists of an overview of each chapter, a list of keywords, exercises and worksheets, and sometimes even extra examples to reinforce points or from which your instructor could construct quizzes on the material. The exercises and forms that you can download from the Companion Website can be used to create an electronic notebook to organize the information that you generate in the grant seeking and proposal writing processes. The following exercises and worksheets are included for your use in class and also for your electronic or print notebook.

Chapter 1 Strategic Planning Exercise
Chapter 2 Peer Review Evaluation Sheet for the Need Statement
Chapter 3 not applicable
Chapter 4 Report on Funding Sources (for library sources)
Querying Strategy for Interpreting RFPs/RFAs or Program Announcements
Chapter 5 Report on Internet Funding Sources
Chapter 6 Peer Review Evaluation Sheet for Letters of Intent
Peer Review Evaluation Sheet for Preproposals
Chapter 7 Advance Planning Exercise
Chapter 8 Identifying Goals, Objectives, and Tasks
Chapter 9 Expanded Project Task Summary Chart
Chapter 10 Designing, Monitoring, Reporting, and Evaluation Plans
Monitoring and Reporting Form
Chapter 11 Goals, Objectives, Tasks, and Outcomes Table
Chapter 12 Expanded Project Task Summary and Budget Chart
Chapter 13 Researching Sponsors' Priorities
Determining Your Competitive Advantage
Organizational Information Section
Chapter 14 Peer Review Evaluation Form for Executive Summaries
Peer Review Evaluation Form for Cover Letters
Peer Review Evaluation Form for Abstracts
Chapter 15 not applicable
Chapter 16 Peer Review Evaluation Form for the Proposal Package
Chapter 17 Review Panel Evaluation Sheet
Chapter 18 not applicable

How to Use the Study Guide for Grant Seeking in an Electronic Age

After you read the chapters in Grant Seeking in an Electronic Age, use this Study Guide on the Companion Website to review what you have learned, test yourself on the key words introduced in the chapter, and download exercises, worksheets, and other forms to complete your homework and other assignments made by your instructor. In some of the study guide chapters, we also provide additional information to supplement the text or additional examples. The information in this Study Guide should help you to pick out the important information in the chapters and provide you with additional practice to enhance your learning.

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