Basics of Proposal Preparation

In the Exchange book, Not Just Small Change: Fund Development for Early Childhood Programs, Roberta Bergman offers these tips for when you are writing a funding proposal:

• It must look neat and orderly.  The look of your proposal gives the funding source a sense of how your organization approaches a task.  No matter how worthy the project, if the proposal itself looks sloppy, is disorganized, or is hard to follow, it can be discarded without having been read.
• Proofread your proposal twice and ask someone else to do so a third time.  It's difficult to proofread something you've written yourself, because you tend to see what you think you've written, not what you've actually written.
• The proposal must follow the funding source's format.  If a foundation wants a two page letter, don't send three pages....  Mirror the funding sources language throughout the proposal. 
• The proposal must be tailored to the individual funding source.  This means creating different proposals for the same project, depending upon what each funding source is interested in.  What will be different in each proposal is the focus ... and you'll know what to focus on from the information you gathered in your research on funding sources.

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