How to Manage a Proposal
For most of us working on proposals, it requires coordinating a bunch of different pieces from a bunch of different partners, internal and external. Even if you’re a one-person shop putting together a proposal, there’s a lot of things to keep track of. When I first started working on proposals full time, I was thrown into the deep end of working on an enormous US federal grant proposal, helping to coordinate dozens of attachments, multiple internal organizational departments, and multiple partners, across multiple time zones. Luckily, I worked under some amazing managers who showed me the ropes, helped smooth out issues, and gave me some organization processes I still use ten years later on the occasional giant federal proposal.
When I worked on my first foundation grant after that I thought, no sweat, I can really focus on the narrative and use this opportunity to improve my writing and worry about the other few little things right before submission.
It did not go well.
I did manage to submit the proposal, but it was by the skin of my teeth, and I spent the weekend after baking cookies for all the justifiably annoyed co-workers whose days I had derailed with my last-minute proposal scramble. That experience was my first brutal reminder that even small proposals require some basic organization and management to go smoothly. If you’re reading this and my experience sounds eerily familiar, or like something you will do anything to avoid, don’t worry, future proposals do not have to involve desperately calling the finance director at 7 pm to ask for their signature on a document you didn’t realize needed signing! From the smallest foundation proposal to the biggest government grant, you can keep things going smoothly with a few basic proposal management steps:
1. Make a list. Once you have read the entire call for proposals or funding opportunity description, write out a checklist of all the pieces of the proposal that you need to submit. If the funder is kind and generous and has made a list for you, read it, check it against the RFP, and use that. Make sure to note any special details like the need for signatures or a notary.
2. Decide who needs to do what. Once you have your list, identify the items on it that need input from someone else, and what specifically you will need from them.
3. Make a timeline. This doesn’t have to be a complicated spreadsheet (though I do have a template for that!), it can be as simple as looking at your calendar and marking the days you need to have things done by. First draft needs to be ready on Monday. Budget needs to be ready Thursday. Try to leave yourself at least 24 hours between when everything is done and when the proposal is due.
4. Confirm the plan. Now that you know what you need, from who, and by when, talk to everyone implicated in the process about what you need, and confirm deadlines with them.
5. Follow up on the plan. Check in with people as internal deadlines approach, make sure they have what they need to get you what you need, and that they can still meet the planned deadline. If not, talk to them about what adjustments can be made to the deadline, and confirm the new timing.
6. Adjust the plan. When changes happen to the timeline, communicate that out to the people you are working with, so everyone knows what is shifting. If the narrative draft is behind by a day, and the finance team needs that to finalize the budget, make sure the finance team knows that the timing has shifted. Talk to impacted partners about how you can help mitigate the impact of timing adjustments. For the budget example, is there a chunk of the narrative that is ready that you can send finance to get the budget started?
7. Start with the submission. When you begin implementing your proposal plan, start by checking the submission process before you start writing, before you start budgeting, before you start calling partners. It’s the easiest thing to forget about, and it’s the biggest headache if you leave it to the last minute and something goes wrong. If the submission is online, confirm whether you have an account set up and that you have the working login credentials for it. If not, register or update credentials. If it’s an email submission, confirm that the email address is working. If it’s a physical submission, confirm the process for submitting. There is nothing worse than getting a proposal together and then realizing that the person who set up the login account for this funder left the organization five years ago, and no one has the password, and the funder’s tech support has a 1.5 hour backlog of other applicants realizing the same thing.
And voila! A beautiful, seamless proposal process that will be so smooth no one will even notice you were working on a proposal that week! OK fine, a proposal process that will keep disasters to a minimum, relationships cordial, and sleep schedules mostly intact.
If you’re looking for examples of timelines and checklists, check out the free resource library, which has examples for both a simple checklist and timeline for managing smaller proposals, and a big giant proposal checklist and timeline for complex proposals, generally a government application. Whatever template you decide works for you, your checklist and timeline should be a living document that is regularly updated and shared with your teammates throughout the proposal process.
