A New Kind of Headache: Fitting a Winning Proposal into Those Tiny Text Boxes
More funding sources – foundation, local, state and federal – are moving to online proposal submission. For a while, this has meant filling out a few info boxes and uploading a Word document with the proposal narrative. For those of us from the old school of proposal writing, this purely functional conveyance of information eliminated little opportunities to shine. Tricks like classy/creative footers and headers, color charts, and even word placement have to be shelved with this kind of ‘just the facts, ma’am” proposal writing.
Pity. I really love all those ways to play positive mind games with funders – maybe a reflection of my unfulfilled interest in retail marketing.
Anyway, the next phase in this minimalist movement is funders’ use of little text boxes with draconian word and/or character limits as in: “Explain your organization’s capacity to implement this project” in 2500 characters (spaces included). Goodbye charts, graphics, organizational charts, proposal beauty. Welcome to the world of texting your proposal.
I just finished Exhibit 1 for the Milwaukee Continuum of Care’s annual $12 million Supportive Housing Program application to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Exhibit 1 is basically the annual plan/proposal – the document that explains how funding will be used in the coming year.
Last year, I really struggled with the text box limits. This year, I did a lot better. Here are some tips I have to share:
- Write your responses in a Word document and upload to the online format. Then you can go a quick word/character/character including spaces count by using the utility at the bottom of the Word document page. Beats counting them by hand. Don’t laugh. I really did that last year. Word will also catch your typos while the online format probably won’t.
- Tighten up your prose! This sounds self-evident. Obviously, if you have a limited number of characters, you’re going to write less. But the key is to write cleaner, more concisely, and more efficiently. Get rid of the adjectives (a rule from the old school that really applies to text writing). Just answer the question that is asked. Clear, focused, but, yes, still punchy.
- Crunch. Don’t dispense with normal conventions of writing. Just tweak them a little. Abbreviate everything; convert names to acronyms. Forget paragraphs and double spacing between sentences. And watch the words you choose – there’s always a shorter one than the one you want to use.
- Have a better product. When you have such limited space to write, you have to really stick with the facts. And you have to make sure the facts are a) accurate; and b) impressive. With no opportunity for fancy weaving or wordsmithing, the proposal writer will have to dig deeper into the organization and, in some cases, help the organization improve its performance and capabilities throughout the year to get ready for big proposal submissions.
- Check it a thousand times. Save, save, save and then check, check, check. Electronic formats have a way of losing revisions, reverting to earlier versions, and disappearing altogether. Take nothing for granted!
I’ll learn more about haiku proposal writing as the funding world continues to evolve – stay tuned.