Category Archives: Copywriting

Free Webinar 2/26: Numbers and Narrative: How to Construct the Crucial Evaluation Piece of Grant Proposals and Reports

“Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.” –Albert Einstein

Unless you’ve been hiding under that proverbial rock, you know that program evaluation and accountability have been hot topics in the nonprofit sector for quite a while. Funders want to know what’s working, what’s not, how we may or may not be accomplishing our mission, what needs are going unmet, and how we might make improvements in the future.

Evaluation can also be great for strategic planning purposes. It will tell you where you’ve been the most successful, where the challenge areas are, and where to go from here. Evaluation helps your clients reflect on their experiences and share their thoughts.

There are many ways of doing both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. But regardless of how you actually go about the process, you will need to start by writing about your evaluation system and tools in your grant proposal, and using them in your grant report(s). How can you do that?

Takeaways
1.   Find out what funders expect to see concerning program evaluation in proposal and reports
2.   Review some examples of effective evaluation sections of grant proposals
3.   Prepare for collecting the data you need to measure your impact (numbers and narrative)
4.   Learn about resources to help you take the next step

Register for the 2/26 webinar (12 PM PST): HERE.

The Insider’s Guide to Writing a Winning Government Grant Proposal

[Dalya’s Note: This blog post is by Nedra Weinreich, a social marketing consultant, author, and speaker at Weinreich Communications.]

I have a secret I’m going to share with you — one that could mean the difference between hundreds of thousands of dollars and zero. I’ve just gotten a glimpse into the other side of the proposal process, and I have learned some very important lessons from it.

As a consultant, a substantial chunk of my time goes to writing proposals to get new business. Quite often, the proposals are in response to a request for proposals (RFP) from a government agency at the Federal, State or local level. Nonprofit organizations also have to spend time on grantwriting to find funding to provide their services.

This week and last, I have been a member of a Federal grant review panel for a Dept. of Health & Human Services agency. This means that I am on a team that reads stacks of grant applications that have been submitted by nonprofits in response to an announcement requesting proposals for funding. I read each proposal and score it according to the evaluation criteria set forth in the announcement, and when the many teams are done reading and scoring, the agency will offer funding to the organizations who scored highest. The difference between those who are funded and those who are not can be a matter of a point or two.

Read full article: HERE

“Ask Dalya”: Advice on using verbs in the active (not passive) voice in proposals and beyond

This “Ask Dalya” series covers 17 of your grantwriting questions. Get lots more Q & A, individual feedback, materials, etc. in the Grantwriter’s FastTrack Coaching Program.

Q: Do you have any thoughts on increasing the use of verbs in the active voice vs. passive voice in our grant proposals? That is one of our biggest struggles.

A: So many nonprofiteers struggle with this. And grant proposal writers are no exception! We may have heard that the active voice is the most effective verb choice, but our schooling or attempts to sound “official” may encourage the opposite.

Active verbs pack a serious punch. They can:

Clarify your meaning
Engage your readers in your work
Pinpoint causes of problems and hold appropriate parties responsible for their actions
Maintain the identity, activity, and efficacy of your characters
Bring a human face to the issue
Allow you to convey well-chosen details
Eliminate excess words, especially prepositions and “to be” verbs

Yes, verbs really can do all that.

Verbs in the passive voice are, well, passive. They connote an unresponsive state of affairs, with not much action or movement. They leave out the subject (who or what is performing the action) and focus on the object (the recipient of the action). In essence, the supposed actor or character is simply lying there passively—like a wet rag—receiving action but not doing a thing.

One easy way to spot passive constructions is to check for verbs that come after a helping form of “to be,” and/or before the word “by.” These sentences leave a lot of questions unanswered with their vague, lifeless descriptions. Continue reading →