Grant Writing: How to Build Credibility with Your Budget Narrative

Need statements, program narratives, and discussions of impact aren’t the only parts of a federal grant application that require the touch of a good writer. The budget narrative – sometimes called the budget justification or budget detail – can also benefit from a skilled wordsmith.

Here, though, the burden carried by the writer weighs heaviest in the areas of precision, thoroughness and organization – and less so in the areas of color and creativity.

What follows are budget narrative writing tips that have been curated from a wide range of federal agency resources.

Grant Writing: 3 Tips for Discussing Impact in Federal Grant Applications

Let’s say that your organization is applying for a federal grant that will support a wildlife reserve restoration project.

You craft a need statement that (1) aligns with the grant-making agency’s funding opportunity announcement; (2) communicates your organization’s experience with restoration projects; and (3) includes several concise – but compelling – anecdotes illustrating the need for restoration.

Now, you and your writing team need to outline the impact that your proposed project will have on the wildlife reserve. Once again, you’ll want to make sure the impact your team projects aligns with agency goals. You will also need to balance specificity with realism.

Below, we continue our grant writing series with tips for defining and projecting the impact of a proposed project. The following tips have been adapted from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Health Resources & Services Administration’s grant writing guide, titled “Tips for Writing and Submitting Good Grant Proposals”.

Tip: Think like a reviewer when you are discussing the impact of your proposed project.

In a previous series post, we discussed the role of peer review panels, as well as the criteria they use to evaluate applications. Such panels provide their evaluations to the federal grant-making agency’s staff.

Grant Writing: 3 Tips for Crafting Need Statements in Federal Grant Proposals

In this space, we have previously shared tips about the pre-writing phase of completing a federal grant application – for example, the importance of reading (and re-reading) the grant announcement, and the importance of understanding the criteria by which your application will be evaluated.

In this post, we dip our toes into the grant writing process itself and share some tips about crafting a need statement. These tips are adapted from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Health Resources & Services Administration’s grant writing guide, titled “Tips for Writing and Submitting Good Grant Proposals”. Along with each tip, we also include an excerpt from an award-winning federal grant proposal that can be viewed in full on the website of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. (IMLS has an excellent collection of proposals that are worthy of review – especially for new federal grant applicants.)