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 should can concentrate on three any combination of four areas
  • Research
  • Plant Construction
  • Salaries of AguaClara Engineers Abroad
    • These salaries can be included in the plant cost
      ** 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 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 1 NTU.)

  1NTU is our (slightly distant) goal, but currently we are only meeting 5NTU, which is the PAHO standard

  • 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. YOU MAY NOT REPRODUCE THIS CONTENT IN ANYWAY.

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