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SIMPLICITY: THE KEY TO RAISING MONEY

I was deeply honored -- and very surprised -- to receive the Distinguished Service Award from the Society, for I am not a scientist. My contact with the scientific world comes through my work with activist conservation groups, most notably Native Seeds/SEARCH (my thanks to Gary Nabhan) and The Wildlands Project (thanks also to David Johns and Michael Soulé). Through these organizations I have learned how conservation biology can be used to change public policy and promote social change. Combined with effective community organizing and outreach, it's a useful tool.

Over the past decade, I've raised about three million dollars for conservation, most of it from private foundations. To share what I've learned, let's begin with a few assumptions:

You've designed a project that addresses a real need in the real world. (Having never raised a dime for basic research, only for conservation activism and -- occasionally -- the applied research to back it up, I don't know if the rules are different. However, I suspect things are pretty much the same.)

This project is essential to meet your scientific and/or conservation goals; in other words, you haven't entered a new field just to take advantage of a funding opportunity. (The military has given us a new name for this phenomenon: "mission creep.")

After serious discussion with your colleagues, you're confident that your organization and/or department has the skills to run the program effectively and manage the money scrupulously.
After thorough research, you've identified funders whose goals and interests match yours. You've called or visited the grantmakers, described the project, and determined their interest in reviewing a grant request. Building strong, peer-to-peer relationships with grantmakers is ultimately more important than what you write in your proposal.

You've written a draft proposal. Now you're sitting at your desk, re-reading it for the third time. Your objectivity is gone, the deadline is approaching, and you really, really, really want this grant. To improve your odds for success, consider the following questions:

1. Will anyone know what I'm talking about? When it's time to put words on paper, or type them onto the computer screen, most of us freeze. Somewhere back in grammar school we learned that the written language is supposed to be formal and proper, and consequently we can't, or won't, write the way we speak. We haul out the big words and try to impress the reader with our vocabulary. We use lots of jargon and technical terms. We create elaborate sentences that are hard to read and even harder to understand.

I once asked a student of mine to describe her group's mission. She said, "Intervention for case management."

"Excuse me?"

"We work with disabled children and teach them how to use their bodies better."

Can you see the difference? The first sentence sounds impressive but means nothing. The second sentence paints a picture using simple, clear words. After enduring my criticism with a smile, she wrote a marvelous mission statement describing what it was like to watch a two-year-old pick up a ball and hold it in her hands for the first time. The class was practically in tears. We were all reaching for our checkbooks.

Put yourself on "jargon patrol" and remove any phrases that a lay person -- a regular citizen working in some other field -- would not easily understand. Lots of grant reviewers, even those in the environmental field, have little or no scientific training. Keep your language and your concepts simple.

2. Will reading this proposal cause a headache?

Dan Petegorsky, a former grants officer, says, "When I'm going through a stack of proposals, I naturally gravitate to the ones that look like they won't give me a headache."

How a grant application looks is nearly as important as what it says. Petegorsky sums up the most common problems: "Bad copies, poor print quality, proposals with tiny type, words running to the edge of the paper. If you can't read it, you can't get it."
You don't need to be a graphic artist to create an attractive proposal. Just keep in mind the following points:

Leave lots of white space.

Use 12-point (or larger) type.

Don't "justify" the text, as you would with narrow columns in a newspaper. Leave the right side of your page "ragged."

Break up the page with subheadings, indented paragraphs, bulleted lists, bold type, etc. These techniques create visual variety and help guide the reader through the text.

Use graphics where appropriate. Maps, graphs, line art and even photos can be incorporated into the body of your proposal.

When creating your application, pity the poor grants officers. I mean that literally. Take pity on these folks -- their brains are marinated in proposals. Give them something attractive, readable, and easy to digest.

3. Am I using the minimum number of words necessary to make my point?

Funders are besieged with unfocused, overly long proposals. Katrin Verclas of the Ottinger Foundation says, "I am sometimes amazed by the confused and convoluted descriptions we get. Presumably, the applicants should be able to describe their work -- but my experience has been otherwise." Jon Jensen of the George Gund Foundation compares his job to being "under an avalanche of information."

For your proposal to succeed, you must be a brutal editor. Weigh each word. If it's redundant, inessential (watch out for those adverbs), or requires a dictionary to understand, edit it out. Your readers will thank you.

Andy Robinson, a trainer and consultant in Tucson, Arizona, received a 1998 SCB Distinguished Service Award for dedicated assistance as an independent advisor to grassroots biodiversity conservation organizations.

Robinson's book Grassroots Grants: An Activist's Guide to Proposal Writing is available from Chardon Press, www.chardonpress.com. For more information, contact Andy Robinson, Telephone (520) 798-3993, Email andyfund@earthlink.net.

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