Proposal writing is an exercise to create the documentation for the programme or project you wish to carry out. It should be distinguished from proposal development, a broader term which covers all components of a proposal package. As you will see below, our focus is on the narrative proposal, where we present a number of key principles and tips to ensure that your proposal is successful and fundable.
Purposes
It is important to note that a proposal serves multiple purposes including:
Fundraising
Required by the prospective funder, as part of the application for funding.
Design
Captures your thinking about what the project will look like, how it will function, and how you will monitor it.
Implementation
If you are awarded funding, then how you design your project is generally how you will be expected to implement, monitor, and report on it. Often the proposal will be included in your funding agreement. Which means that we need to be careful to design our project in a way that’s realistic and feasible.
Accountability
We should hold ourselves, and the funder will hold us, to delivering on our commitments.
Key principles a proposal must follow
- Logical response to an important issue
- Being realistic and achievable
- Alignment with your organisation’s strategy and comparative advantage
- Being context-aware, both of needs and of other actors and factors
- Manage risks (including “do no harm”)
It should also be convincing and well-presented, in particular:
- Aligned with donor’s guidance and requirements, including eligibility of activities and costs
- Follow donor’s instructions to the letter
- “Responsive” to donor’s priorities (funding as an investment)
- Reflect your best possible understanding of situation & other actors
- Demonstrate your capacity to deliver
- Consistent and coherent
Proposal writing tips
Overall, it should be clear who will do what; when and where they will do this; why they will do it; and how they will do it. This also helps to show feasibility of what’s proposed. More specifically:
- Document should be clear and easy to understand
- The 5 Ws and 1 H: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How?
- Use active voice (“X will conduct Y”) rather than passive voice (“Y will be conducted”)
- Be consistent: both within the narrative and across all parts of the proposal package
- Show that you understand the context, and what your unique contribution will be
- Recognise prior and ongoing work and resources; show how you will build on these, or complement them
- Show how the initiative will be sustained (unless the goal is to be reached by project’s end)
- Spell out acronyms; don’t assume donor will know local details
- Limit use of jargon; don’t assume donor will be expert on the topic
Why it is important to recognise other work and resources:
- Show that you won’t be duplicating/overlapping with others
- Show that you won’t be “starting entirely from scratch” – this can make a donor nervous, as they’ll wonder how the work can be sustained. Similarly, a donor may hesitate to serve as the lone funder, covering the entire cost rather filling gaps
- Re-read your work, and have someone else read it over
Budgeting tips for proposals
Many funders will be reassured to know that an organisation has other sources of funding – while they may not mind covering the full cost of certain programmatic activities, they generally prefer to cover only a portion of overhead or operating costs (office rent and utilities, compensation of administrative staff).
Similarly, funders tend to appreciate when they can add to, or complement, existing platforms or ongoing activities which are funded from other sources.
- Clear: cost-items should be detailed and easily understandable
- Consistent: cost-items should match the proposed activities, and be standardised
- Justified: are the cost-items necessary?
- Reasonable: are the cost-items aligned with the project’s scope, by scale and by type?
- Overhead/indirect costs: show the % to be covered by the funder
- Matching: if possible/requested, show how the organisation will contribute (its own resources, or from another source)
- Complementarity: explain how the new funds will leverage existing resources/capacity
- Sustainability: explain what will happen when project-funding ends
We hope you have found these useful. The text has been prepared by a team of consultants at Consult KM International, including senior Programme Design & Proposal Development Specialist and senior Proposal Writer.
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