Grant Applications Editing and Proofreading Services

Seventy-two applications went out from one organization last year, and eleven came back funded. The eleven were not written about better work than the sixty-one. They answered the question the form actually asked, inside the word count the form allowed, with the evidence an assessor needed in order to score them. The other sixty-one described what the organization does, which is a different task and is scored by nobody.

The documents we edit for Grant Applications

Applications to private foundations, community foundations, corporate giving programs, and government agencies make up most of the work. Letters of inquiry and stage one forms come with them, along with project descriptions, delivery plans, statements of need, and outcomes frameworks. We also edit budgets and the narratives justifying them, partnership and coalition proposals, sustainability plans, governance and child protection sections, monitoring and evaluation proposals, reports against grants already received, and the letters that follow a decline. Our editors answer the question in front of the applicant rather than the question the applicant wishes had been asked.

What the editing involves

The outcomes section is where most applications lose their points, because organizations describe activity and funders score change. A proposal promising forty workshops for two hundred young people has described a plan. What an assessor needs is what will be different afterward, for whom, by how much, and how anyone will know. An outcome written as "young people will be more confident" cannot be scored at all. An outcome written as "60 of 200 participants will report a new qualification or a job application within six months" can be scored, argued with, and checked a year later.

Each outcome should name who changes and in what way, and it should carry a figure the organization genuinely believes rather than one chosen to look impressive. The measurement attached to it has to be something the staff can actually collect. A line reading "we will use a validated well-being instrument" fails at the point where nobody has the hours to administer it, while a six-week follow-up phone call gets made. The baseline belongs in the same section, either stated outright or with a sentence saying how it will be established in the first month of the grant. An outcome with a number, a method, and a baseline reads as a plan; the same outcome without them reads as a hope.

The other half of this work is cutting. Assessors discount an entire set of outcomes when one of them is obviously unachievable, so a proposal claiming three credible outcomes usually scores above one claiming eight. The same discipline applies to the word count, which is not a suggestion, and a 500-word answer that reaches the limit and stops is stronger than one that ran out of room in the middle of its evidence. Applications written this way lose on the merits or win on the merits, which is the only position an applicant can improve from.

Confidentiality and the limits of our role

Everything you send us is treated in confidence, including proposals in progress and material about your organization's finances. We are editors, not grant consultants, and we offer no opinion on which funders to approach, on eligibility, or on the merits of any project. What we can do is make the application answer the questions asked, within the limits set, with the evidence attached.