Writing Without Certainty
The pros and cons of prewriting grant proposals
Prewriting a grant proposal is a strategy endorsed by many in the grantseeking community. Prewriting should not be confused with assembling boilerplate text. Boilerplate is existing text on common topics, such as an organization’s history or areas of expertise. While prewriting a proposal usually involves leveraging boilerplate, it goes beyond simply searching for existing text that might be useful. Prewriting is more than just writing. It can also involve conducting background research and collecting internal data.
Prewriting can be a contentious topic in the grant community and within organizations, with proponents on one side and skeptics on the other. The truth is somewhere in between the two camps: Prewriting can play a role in proposal development, but for most proposals, it will be a small one.
Prewriting Pros & Cons
For prewriting enthusiasts, prewriting is a solution to the very real problem of having to develop most proposals within a few weeks of a solicitation’s posting. Prewriting spreads proposal work over a longer period, potentially reducing workload burdens once the solicitation is published. Understandably, completing most of the writing in advance sounds very appealing. But it has some major drawbacks.
Gathering boilerplate in anticipation of an upcoming proposal is like pulling out your luggage to inspect it and check that it will serve you on your next trip, whenever that might be. Prewriting is like packing your bags and purchasing travel supplies when you don’t know where you are going, when you’ll be traveling, or how long your trip will be. The trip may never happen, or it may happen a year from now, and the circumstances may be very different from what you imagine.
The uncertainty factor is why prewriting is not universally adopted. Many funders also caution against it, advising applicants to wait until the solicitation is released before beginning work on their proposal.
Prewriting can be successful if one thing is done well
Proponents of prewriting believe it is possible to write most of a proposal before the solicitation is released, based on educated guesses about core elements, such as where the proposed work will take place, who the target beneficiaries will be, and the anticipated project goals.
These educated guesses come from talking with peers and program officers, and from online research on what the funder has recently funded and publicly said about its programmatic priorities. If this information-gathering (referred to as “capture”) has gone well, it can produce high-quality, detailed information that proves quite accurate.
Whether prewriting is a good investment of time depends almost entirely on the success of the capture work, or the information-gathering phase.
If you can gather reliable information about what the solicitation contains, the proposal sections you could develop include:
Project objectives and activity section introductory paragraphs.
Resource descriptions, including infrastructure, local partners, and expertise.
Organizational history and past performance summaries.
Management and personnel pieces, including job descriptions for positions expected to be needed, a draft organizational chart, and bios of staff likely to assume key positions.
The background and context section sometimes comes up as a section that can be drafted in advance, but this is almost always an unsuccessful exercise. The background and context section (aka the problem statement) must align with the proposed project strategy. However, the strategy cannot be developed until the solicitation is in hand and the funder’s goals are confirmed. Other than some initial pricing work, proposal budgets are also typically not worth starting until after the solicitation drops, and more is known about potential activities.
For proponents of prewriting, the number of sections that can potentially be drafted before the solicitation is released is the main argument in its favor. Although preliminary writing may require substantial revisions, prewriting advocates find the idea of achieving a head start on the proposal highly persuasive.
Prewriting may waste resources
Skeptics and prewriting proponents alike would agree that the following can be safely completed while waiting for a solicitation to drop:
Studying the funder and the funder’s current grantees.
Identifying boilerplate.
Completing preliminary background research on the subject matter.
Creating a proposal workspace and setting up a file structure.
Discussing potential proposal team members, project staff, and external partners.
Completing the tasks above helps ensure the proposal team will be ready to vet the opportunity if and when it is released. It also helps the team quickly begin developing the proposal if a decision is made to apply.
The payoff with prewriting is less certain. Its skeptics are more hesitant to commit resources to developing a proposal until they see the solicitation and confirm it makes sense to apply.
Skeptics are also wary of prewriting for another reason: Prewriting is not always a time-saver. In fact, it can be the opposite for two reasons:
Inefficient. Any writing done before the solicitation comes out will need revisions, sometimes substantial ones, depending on the accuracy of the predictions about the solicitation’s content. The time spent prewriting the proposal and subsequently rewriting it once the solicitation is released can be less efficient than waiting for the solicitation and planning a response based on it.
Unmotivating. Proposal team members are assigned proposal work in addition to their main responsibilities, such as project implementation. Only a few staff members at any organization are likely to serve as full-time proposal writers and managers, and they may be juggling multiple proposals. Without a live opportunity and the pressure of a looming due date, most people will find it difficult to dedicate time to researching and prewriting proposal sections amid other, more urgent responsibilities.
Should you incorporate prewriting into your proposal process?
When prewriting makes sense
Adding prewriting to your proposal strategy can make sense if:
Your organization is willing to invest resources to conduct capture (i.e., the information-gathering phase). If done well, the capture phase will give you as clear an idea as possible about key areas before you start writing, including what the solicitation may contain (e.g., programmatic goals, geographic focus, beneficiaries), when it is likely to be posted, and who will be eligible to apply.
You and your colleagues are willing and able to dedicate time to developing a proposal for a funding opportunity that may never go anywhere, either because the solicitation never posts or because it differs significantly from what was expected and is no longer worth pursuing.
What to do instead of prewriting
Regardless of whether your organization has the knowledge and resources to make prewriting worthwhile, it may be more fruitful to focus on organizing and logistics tasks while you wait for a funding opportunity announcement. Activities that may pay greater dividends than prewriting may include:
Identifying and fostering relationships with potential partners.
Researching and establishing contacts with funders.
Completing an inventory of your website content and refreshing it as needed so that when a funder or potential funder seeks information about your organization, they will find up-to-date, informative content.
Practicing and developing skills that will help you and your team write and manage future proposals, such as understanding when and how to use AI, how to create a proposal template, and how to conduct a literature review.
Reviewing past proposals and their outcomes (funded, not funded) to determine what worked and didn’t, and incorporating these lessons learned into the proposal development process.
Conclusion
Prewriting involves drafting sections of a proposal based on assumptions and background research on the anticipated solicitation. If an organization has solid intel on the solicitation, including when it will be released and the project goals, it can be worth beginning the writing process before the solicitation posts.
If the intel is unreliable or an organization lacks the resources to research a potential funding announcement, it does not make sense to engage in prewriting. Without good information, whatever you write will be based on uneducated guesses and will likely require such significant rewriting that it will not save the proposal team any time to have done this advanced work.
Often, the push to prewrite can come from senior staff who have managed teams and projects but who have little hands-on experience with proposals. From their perspective, starting proposal work early makes intuitive and resource-management sense: If a funding opportunity is anticipated, why not work on it now to reduce the workload when the solicitation drops (especially if some staff are currently underoccupied)?
This argument seems logical, but it is flawed because time spent on work that will turn out irrelevant and unusable is not time saved. Unless the funding opportunity is cyclical and the funder releases it every year with few changes, there are generally too many uncertainties to guarantee that the prewriting will align with the solicitation.
Ideally, an organization will take a methodical approach when deciding whether to prewrite a proposal by looking at how well prewriting has worked on earlier proposals, examining metrics such as:
Did the prewriting end up saving the team time (if so, how much)?
Did the prewriting reduce the proposal team’s workload and stress during the proposal development period and after the solicitation dropped (if so, how much)?
Did the prewritten material require major or minor rewrites? (For this to be useful, define what equals major and minor.)
Was the intel accurate? If not, what additional resources (in terms of quantity or quality) would be needed to ensure greater accuracy?
Were proposals that involved prewriting more or less likely to result in an award (and how might prewriting have contributed to that outcome)?
Organizations are accustomed to monitoring and evaluating funded projects; however, they often fail to assess the effectiveness of their own decision-making. If an organization is unable or unwilling to invest in capture work and evaluate whether prewriting has led to better outcomes (i.e., more funded proposals or greater efficiency), a safer bet is to avoid it in favor of other tasks that represent a better return on investment.
The truth is, writing is usually not the bottleneck for proposals; it’s the lack of clarity about what should be written. In most cases, clarity about the project design and what the solicitation requires will be the more reliable path to a faster writing process than prewriting.