Grant Writing Guidelines

A General Note To All

• Grant writing must reflect your passion for your cause, but you must be weary of your audience when doing so.
• Be cautious of over-complication, remember that you probably already know more about the subject than the grant reader.
  • If they feel confused or lost, they will put your grant down and pick up a different one.
  • However, if the grant is of a technical nature, be sure to include what is necessary.
• Remember that money is involved, so try to keep your submissions away from an academic style and more tuned to a business style of writing.
• Go over your grant several times with multiple editors.
• Be sure you can provide evidence supporting your statements before you put pen to paper, as many organizations look to third parties to verify information.
• More is less- if you can eliminate three penny or five cent words by replacing it with a good ten or twenty-five cent word, then do so.
• ALWAYS READ THE INSTRUCTIONS ON THE GRANT
  • This guide should only serve as a general template for grant writing and is by no means a substitute for the instructions provided by the proposals themselves.
  • Many funding organizations have very specific instructions for making contact and they may choose to deny our request if their terms are not followed

AguaClara Goals

• Grants can concentrate on any combination of four areas
  • Research
  • Plant Construction
  • Salaries of AguaClara Engineers Abroad
    • These salaries can be included in the plant cost and design work

• Change your language in the grant according to which goal you are concentrating on.
• If it is a Research grant, then the language should be more technical in nature as you can expect the funders to have more knowledge about the subject.
  • If the grant is for plant construction, then try to make it less technical and mention more of the direct benefits provided by each AguaClara plant.
• Be sure to quantify your findings when ever possible (i.e. The AguaClara Plants are designed to reduce water turbidity to less than 5 NTU with an ultimate goal of reaching the 1NTU mark in the future)
• REMEMBER TO HAVE YOUR GRANT PROOFREAD BY SEVERAL INDIVIDUALS THAT ARE KNOWLEDGEABLE IN THE TECHNICAL ASPECT OF THE WRITING AS WELL AS BY INDIVIDUALS WHO ARE HAVE A TALENT FOR LANGUAGE.
• Also make sure that all grants are passed to Monroe for a final read-through. He has to submit grants personally through Cornell's system first!

Samples

Please refer to the attachments to this page for more help with different components of a grant

Website Help

• http://schumer.senate.gov/new_website/grants.cfm
• http://grants.gov/

Guide

The following document is an excellent guideline to use when writing a grant. I recommend all potential grant writers to read it over carefully and to look back at it if you are stuck.

Please refer to How To Write a Good Grant Proposal
*By Barbara Davis

(*http://www.mcf.org/mcf/grant/writing.htm) for more information on Grant writing