Grant Writing

Writing a proposal requires a major time commitment. Ideally, one should begin 3-6 months before due date, although it's not uncommon for people to begin as late as a week or two beforehand. Our business practice at Grants Gateway is "the more time the better."

Doing the initial research, building an organizational team within the college and an external alliance of partners and prospective users, defining the measurable objectives and associated activities requires a lot of collaboration on the front end. A needs assessment is usually necessary to document the need for the clients to be served in the project. Moreover, documenting the interest of students and faculty is equally important. Asserting the need for the project idea is a poor substitute for obtaining survey results from your planned participants. It's also a good idea to plan far enough in advance so that you can secure commitments from faculty and business clients to work on the project. All of this suggests to the readers that you have done your homework.

Most if not all grant submissions to the federal [or state] government will be electronic. At the federal level there is a process called e-grants, a grant submission protocol developed over the 2002-2008 period. The URL for the federal site is  http://www.grants.gov/ .  Because you will be submitting electronically, you must prepare all attachments for this kind of delivery. This means special bulletins, brochures, booklets, etc., must be scanned, saved as documents and then added to the full document to be submitted.  Also, all grantees must obtain a DUNS number and register officially with the Grants.gov site. Of course, the grants office proabably will have done this already.

Then you sit back and wait . . . . for the good news, hopefully.