Storytelling for Grantseekers: A Guide to Creative Nonprofit Fundraising

chapter FOUR

The Proposal Narrative

Introducing the Characters and the Place

If a letter of inquiry is akin to a short story, then a proposal narrative is analogous to a novel. When I first started working in the nonprofit field nearly two decades ago, proposal narratives often were of epic length, some as long as fifteen, twenty, even twenty-five pages. Today, in response to changing funder requirements and the use of online submissions, we write slimmer stories that typically run between five to ten pages in length, occasionally even shorter. There’s a lot of information that must be packed in these relatively few pages. For a proposal to rise out of the “slush pile” of other submissions, it must engage the reader by being well written ...