Here are some tips I share with organizations, grant writers, and educators that can help make the design and development of proposals much more effective and efficient (and less stressful!):

• Start early and set aggressive deadlines for team tasks and proposal completion. Even if you don’t start early, set aggressive deadlines! Teams will take as much time as you give them to complete tasks and arrive at agreement on project designs. Contact partners and evaluators as soon as possible and set deadlines well in advance of proposal due dates. This decreases the chance of errors in your proposal or budget (which are often changed at the last-minute) and gives you time to troubleshoot any technical or administrative issues.
• Read and understand all of the grant requirements and selection criteria. Many times, people will begin developing project ideas without taking the time to read the whole grant, or educate their team on requirements and criteria. Make sure that you understand every bit of the grant, and reach out to your program officer with questions right away.
• Use a logic model to develop your project/program. Logic models are essential strategic planning tools for non-profit organizations, and they are fantastic tools for developing grant projects in education, human services, and the arts. A logic model helps you develop a coherent project design, and clearly align your resources, activities, outputs, and outcomes against your goals. A logic model will also reinforce the key differences between outputs and outcomes. They are also extremely helpful for designing evaluations.  The W. K. Kellogg Foundation has an awesome guide for using logic models.
• Research evidence-based methods or best practices. This is often critical for government funding programs. As you begin to develop your project/program, conduct some research to see what evidence-based or research-based methods are being used in similar programs. What types of methods are showing results? Are there best practices or standards for the program you are developing or expanding? As an alternative, do you have significant data to show that your methods are effective? I’ve been surprised at how many teams I’ve consulted with who conduct little to no research prior to project/program development, and who then have to scramble to address it when it comes time to write their proposals. Make sure that you can align your proposal with a strong conceptual framework, best/promising practices, or evidence-based methods.
• Seek out the data! Applicants are increasingly called upon to provide a concrete needs assessment, so be prepared to forage for whatever data you can find to show a compelling need for funding. If you have limited access to data, make sure to discuss that in your proposal (after all, creating a process for collecting and analyzing data can often be a valuable process output). But even if you are lacking data, make sure that you’ve done as much as you can to obtain and analyze what’s available – even if that means creating a stakeholder survey or finding another means to collect qualitative data – and then make sure to document your efforts. Starting early is very important in this regard, because it will give you the opportunity to develop data collection methods if none exist.
• Make it easy on your reviewers. Grant reviewers have to read a lot of proposals, so it is definitely to your benefit to make it easy for them to read and understand your grant. I recommend that you create headers/questions directly out of the selection criteria and use them to structure your proposal. That way, reviewers will see how you address each component of the grant, point-by-point. This is also helpful for making sure that you have, indeed, addressed each component of the grant.
• Solicit feedback from team members, partners, and stakeholders along the way. Don’t want until the last minute to ask for comments, feedback and reviews. And make sure to have a couple of great proofreaders available as you finalize your proposal. You will need fresh eyes to proofread your grant!
• And finally… learn to love the grant submission process. Whether it’s an electronic/online or paper process, submitting a government grant is always a major pain. Applications require long appendices (find a good scanner) and are always accompanied by complicated mandatory forms. Web-based systems are known to be v-e-r-y slow and often crash in the last few hours before deadlines. There’s not much you can do about it except start early and maintain a good sense of humor.

Good luck with your grant development!

Here are seven super tips for tweetslingers*:

Ignore the Twitter prompt. The answer to the question “What are you doing?” is just generally not that interesting. If you’re going to tweet about something you’re doing, make sure that it’s relevant, engaging, and worth the attention of your followers.

Be authentic. This is especially important if you are tweeting on behalf of a business or organization. Don’t be a billboard or a press release! Give your tweets a real human voice.

Retweet regularly. Share (and credit!) relevant and interesting blog posts, articles and links that you or your followers will find interesting. It’s not only good Twitter karma, but it’s also a way to build credibility and your reputation in areas of interest. (Note: If you aren’t quoting someone directly, you can also use “via @username” to share his/her link while still distinguishing your words. This also results in Twitter goodness!)

Use humor abundantly. Use snark sparingly. Know the difference! Feel free to be funny and thoughtfully critical, but too much negativity can turn off followers.

Use #hashtags to make your tweets more searchable. Words that follow the # symbol in tweets are called hashtags. This is an informal way of assigning a keyword to a tweet so that others can easily find it. Hashtags are a method of connecting tweets about the same subject, making it easier for users to find tweets on the same topic. Hashtags are often used by event conference organizers as a way of streaming all tweets about the event.

Revise your tweets. Take a moment before you hit ‘Update’ to check your spelling and read for clarity. It’s always a good idea to see if you can make your tweet shorter, too. Shorter than 140 characters? You bet! If you want your tweets to be retweetable, you’ll make sure to give your followers some unused characters.

Converse. Social media is just that: social! Respond to tweets, join in conversations, and encourage your followers to talk to you!

Happy tweeting!

*Bonus: awesome alliteration!

(This post also appeared on the Design Rangers Camp Blog!)