The Insider's Guide to Grantmaking: How Foundations Find, Fund, and Manage Effective Programs

Writing the Funding Document

Those three little words, “if written well,” cover a multitude of sins in the writing of funding documents. Getting it right is a challenge, even to a facile writer, for the funding document demands a distinctive and unusual blend of composition skills and styles. This level of sophistication, moreover, is demanded of grantmakers, who, by and large, do not enjoy putting pen to paper. Many things draw people to foundation work—the passion to change the world, a desire to help people, a yen to affect public policy—but rarely is anyone drawn to this calling by a burning desire to generate prose. In fact, many program officers will readily say that writing is the part of their job that they like the least.

In the case ...