Reading a grant proposal is like walking through a museum. The tour can be guided or unguided. You can wander through the museum yourself, looking at individual exhibits and reading the placards, and that might be a good experience, especially if you have a good working knowledge of the subject at hand (be it art or natural history or what have you). But how much more engaging is a tour with a tour guide, someone knowledgeable who will take you through the exhibits in an order that makes the most sense based on some overarching theme? The guide is someone who will not just tell you the most important aspects of each exhibit, but also how those exhibits tie together as small groups, and how those small groups tie together in the larger theme. This usually has a much greater impact than wandering through the museum on our own.

As grant writers, we are like tour guides. When we present a grant proposal, we ask the reader to walk through our museum. Data points and other bits of hard information are like exhibits.  We can let the reader walk unguided, meaning we just casually group those related exhibits together and hope the reader gets the point we want to make. Or, we can give the reader a guided tour, telling them the overall concepts behind the groups of data points, and then gently shepherding them from one concept to another based on a pre-planned route. In this session, we'll review techniques for an effective guided tour, and how writers can adopt those techniques to make their proposals easier to read, easier to understand, and easier to fund.

Presenter:

Tom Assel is the Vice-President and a Senior Writer with Assel Grant Services since 2012. He provides administrative and technology support for the consultancy, in addition to grant research, proposal writing, and editing. Tom earned the Grant Professional Certification (GPC) in March of 2016 from the Grant Professionals Certification Institute. He has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering.

Skill Level:
Early-Career

Learning Path: 
Proposal Development/Communication Strategies

GPC Competencies:
How to craft, construct, and submit an effective grant application