Tired of recreating the grant narrative wheel?
It didn’t take me long in my grant writing career to realize that we tend to use the same language over and over again in one grant application or another. Your organization is probably seeking funding for a handful of programs or projects, and each funder asks similar questions. For instance, as I was writing an application, I’d reference the last application to that funder, or I’d comb my memory to think back to which recent application answered a similar question. It made me feel like I was recreating the wheel each time.
It took me over a decade to question this process. While I was researching for my business plan, I stumbled on what some grant professionals called a copy/paste document: one place where your responses to a particular application could live, which you could copy and paste into another application. Others might put their application responses into a spreadsheet or table. Genius!
It got me thinking: what about extending that idea to the entire organization’s grant program?
These days, I call it an institutional language document. This is information relevant to the entire institution. I create a Google Document for each client that includes all the basics about the organization we’re constantly tracking down (UEI, mailing address, staff bios), plus the most recent responses to standard grant application questions (program goals and objectives, implementation plans, evaluation, etc.). I make sure to cite which application or report the language was used in. And since I work in the Google ecosystem, I link out to the project folders for each of the grants the client submitted in the last year, which makes it easy to track down each grant application if I need to dig deeper.
This system has saved me so much time! It does take a little discipline to update it after each grant application (I regularly find myself putting it off because it’s honestly a little boring). But I love having one document with all information rather than having to remember which grant I last answered a similar prompt. I can follow the table of contents or just do a quick control+F to find what I’m looking for. (I’ve read there are generative AIs out there now that will accomplish some of this for you: plug in all your past application narrative, and it’ll summarize and synthesize that information per prompt. I’m curious how that might work in the future to speed up first drafts.)
Finally, a note on plagiarism and self-plagiarism: do yourself a favor and always cite your sources, whether from internal or external sources. I find this easiest to do in footnotes, which I copy over to and from the institutional documents. And I shouldn’t have to say this, but don’t use precisely the same narrative language from one grant application to another, particularly if the application is to the same funder. Not only is it ethically questionable, but the funder will know you phoned it in, and there’s a good chance you’re not actually responding to the narrative prompt.
Do you maintain a systematic document like this to keep your grant narratives straight?
The cover image is from my grandparent’s first RV trip in 1970. They traveled from Virginia to Oklahoma with my mom and aunt, and they all pulled over at the Texas welcome center to snap this photo. We have this particular photo thanks to my stepfather, who scanned in all their family slides! Now my husband and I are “recreating the wheel” by traveling in our own RV around the country.