Hone

You've submitted a proposal! Congratulations! On to the next one, right?

I apologize for this aside into Millennial culture. But hopefully this will remind you to do After Action Reviews (and use the findings!)

Cue Michael Scott from The Office: 'No! God! Please! Noooooooo!!'

(Sorry. I'm a Millennial, or maybe Gen X. I don't really know.)

But seriously: Stop. Take a moment. Learn something.

This is HONE. The fourth and final step of the ARCH model. And it's the step most organizations skip entirely.

At RTI, I fought for After Action Reviews on every major proposal.

Win or lose, we’d gathered the team to ask four questions.

What was supposed to happen? (What was our strategy going in?) What actually happened? (Reality vs. our plan)

Why was there a difference? (Honest analysis of what went right or wrong) What will we do differently? (Actionable changes for next time)

I remember one bid in that we lost. The loss letter was complementary. Very few negative comments about our technical approach. But the winner had an entirely local team. Including a bunch of organizations that I'd met with during our research phase.

We'd considered more local partnerships, but ended up emphasizing international best practices and technical expertise over local knowledge.

The After Action Review

What was supposed to happen: We'd win based on our technical expertise.

What actually happened: The funder chose a much more local team.

Why the difference: We had expertise but didn't demonstrate local partnership or leadership.

What we changed: For country-specific RFPs, we'd exhaust local partnership possibilities before turning to international expertise. Make local organizations partners from day one.

HONE isn't about massive transformations.

It's about getting a little better after every proposal.  Better at understanding funder needs, explaining HOW you execute, and positioning your differentiators.

Those improvements, those iterations and adaptations compound.

One idea that I never got to implement in my health systems work (because we didn’t win the proposal!) is micro evaluations to drive program adaptation. 

I do that now with HONE. Instead of on programs, I do it on proposals.

After Action Reviews aren’t complicated

Just spend two hours with your proposal team. Schedule one hour right after submission and another right after the decision.

Do your best to answer the four questions honestly: What was supposed to happen? What actually happened? Why was there a difference? What will we do differently?

Document what you learn, put it in the proposal folder, share the findings, combine insights from other AARs.

Build your institutional knowledge and stop making the same mistakes.

Final thoughts on this series

Growth isn't a sprint. It's a marathon. High quality processes, whether getting out the door every day for a run or describing “How?” every time, leads to strong outcomes outcomes.

ANALYZE. What makes you different.

REVEAL. Aligned funders.

CRAFT. Proposals that show HOW.

HONE. Every proposal.

These are the processes that lead to wins.

Ok, actual final thoughts

Last week, my friend’s dad died of a stroke. If you are a runner, you knew him. Jeff Galloway.

Jeff was a pioneer of process. He knew how to modify a training cycle to help people achieve their goals. As long as you followed through on the plan, he was going to get you across the finish line.

He loved the process. His peers would tell stories of how he never missed a workout and would record each one meticulously in a notebook.

In fact, he loved the process so much that he was training to run the Honolulu Marathon last December at 80 years old before a knee injury sidelined him.

You don’t have to love the process of running, or growth and development, as much as Jeff did to be successful.

But the run/walk method still helped tens of thousands of people accomplish their goals. RIP Jeff.

Craft

Years ago, I took on a new role. One of my first tasks: Read through our organization's old proposals to understand how we positioned our work.

I sat down with a stack of paper (Yes, I printed them out).

And I found myself writing the same question in the margins. 'How?'

'We will train community health workers.' How?

'We will strengthen health systems.' How?

'We will build local capacity.' How?

The proposals were full of great ideas. Good capabilities, good examples, impact. But when it came to implementation? Handwaving.

Proposal writing is a lot like crafting. Only you’re less likely to burn yourself with hot glue.

This is where most proposals fail. At HOW.

Most proposals read like activity lists. Train 50 CHWs. Conduct 200 home visits. Serve 1,000 families. Improve health outcomes.

That tells a funder WHAT you'll do. It doesn't tell them HOW you'll actually do it.

I get it. It's hard. It's so much easier to write 'we will train community health workers' than to dig into the specifics. What training format? (One week intensive workshop? Monthly sessions? Self-paced?) Who delivers the training? (Clinical officer? External consultant? Peer trainers?) What's covered? (Specific topics, tools, job aids?) How do you ensure quality? (Mentoring visits? Competency assessments? Refresher courses?)

Getting specific is hard work. But it's the difference between proposals that win and proposals that don't.

Here's an example of the HOW that funders need. 'We will train 50 CHWs to provide emergency care and hospital referrals in an experiential one-week course, using mannequins and models to practice skills, led by our Clinical Officer who has 15 years of field experience. Topics include bleeding control, stabilization, safe transport using locally available materials, and proper use of emergency first aid kits. Our Clinical Officer will conduct quarterly mentoring visits with each CHW to observe quality of care, troubleshoot challenges, and provide refresher training.'

See what that does?

Training format: One-week intensive, experiential with mannequins. Who delivers it: Clinical Officer with 15 years experience. What's covered: Specific topics (bleeding control, stabilization, transport, equipment). Quality mechanisms: Quarterly mentoring visits, observation, troubleshooting, refresher training.

When you explain HOW in detail, you demonstrate that you've done this before. You know the implementation challenges. You've thought through solutions. You have the expertise to execute.

Funders aren't looking for good ideas.

They're looking for organizations that know HOW to turn ideas into impact. Confidence is what they're buying. And confidence comes from specificity.

For every major activity in your proposal, answer:

How is the work structured? (Intensive training vs. ongoing workshops vs. one-on-one mentoring)

Who? Who executes this? What qualifications do they have?

What? specifically is covered? What tools or curricula are used?

Results? How do you ensure it's done well? What metrics and oversight exists? How do you adjust when challenges arise?

If you can't answer these questions, you're not ready to write the proposal. If you can answer them, your proposal just became stronger than 80% of your competition.

I still do this when I write proposals.

I read through my own writing and put 'How?' next to every vague statement. 'We will provide comprehensive support.' How? 'We will use evidence-based approaches.' How? 'We will collaborate with community partners.' How?

Winning proposals don't make the reviewer ask.

CRAFT is the third step of ARCH.

It's where you take everything you've learned from ANALYZE (your differentiation) and REVEAL (funder alignment) and show HOW you'll execute. In confidence-building detail.

Because funders pay for ability to execute, not vague promises.

Reveal

A couple weeks ago, I saw an RFP looking for a grant writer to apply for 30 RFPs a month.

Thirty. A month.

I don't know what business they were in, but those responses were completely written by AI with zero donor or client specificity and they weren't getting funded.

This is the opposite of REVEAL. The second step in the ARCH model. The key to REVEAL is alignment.

Alignment between your organization, the donor or funder, and what they're trying to accomplish with their support.

I use systematic tools to clarify alignment possibilities: foundation spreadsheets with a simple three tier alignment, qualification scorecards to identify fit, and AI tools to extract meaning from disparate grants.

My philosophy: It's better to submit 2 high-quality, well-aligned grants than 5 mediocre ones.

Let me show you a simple example.

Let's say you run a peer-led health navigation program for homeless people.

Your differentiator, identified under ANALYZE, is that your services are delivered by people with lived experience, and your data shows 3x higher engagement than traditional clinical models.

You see RFPs from two foundations:

Foundation A. Requests outreach services to homeless populations. The foundation has typically funded facility-based services, with past grantees including FQHCs, hospital systems, and academic medical centers. Language in their RFP: ' clinical interventions.' Average grant: $500K.

Foundation B. Funds community-based organizations using innovative engagement models. Past grantees: Peer-led programs, grassroots organizations. Language: 'community-driven solutions, centering lived experience.' Average grant: $200K.

Which should you pursue?

Foundation B is obvious, right?

But the grant from Foundation A is more money and the peer navigation program leads to improved clinical outcomes! (I know some growth officers who think this way...)

Which, sure. And also, you're not being responsive to what Foundation A actually funds. They fund FQHCs and hospitals. Their language is about clinical interventions. Their past grantees are clinical providers. You're a community-based organization with a peer-led model. That's not alignment.

You could spend weeks crafting a proposal showing how peer navigation improves clinical outcomes. You could cite research. You could build a compelling logic model. And you'd still lose. Because Foundation A doesn't fund organizations like yours.

REVEAL isn't just 'find funders who fund health.' It's about three things.

Research what donors actually fund.

Don't just read their website's program descriptions.

Look at their 990s (for private foundations).

Check their grants databases (for public funders).

See who they've funded in the past 2-3 years. What types of organizations? (Budget size, geography, structure)

What approaches? (Clinical? Community-based? Policy advocacy?)

What's the average grant size? If they say they fund 'health equity' but every grantee is a hospital system with a $50M budget, and you're a $2M community org, that's not alignment.

An Austrian who died 75 years ago knew a lot about foundation research

Understand their priorities, not just their program areas.

One of my favorite quotes is from Joseph Schumpter, “The budget is the skeleton of the state, stripped of all misleading ideologies”.

Or more simply, as Joe Biden put it, “Show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value.”

Invest time where you're positioned to win.

This is the hardest part of REVEAL. It means saying NO to low probability opportunities and investing more in high probability ones.

Most nonprofits do the opposite: they chase everything and win little.

Before writing any proposal (or even an LOI), I ask three questions:

Does this funder's actual grant history show they fund organizations like us? (Organizations with our structure, approach, budget size, and philosophy.)

Does their language match our language? (If they emphasize clinical care and we emphasize peer support, that's a mismatch.)

Can we make a unique, credible case for why WE should win this? (Our differentiators.)

If you can't answer yes to all three, don't apply. Save your time for opportunities where you're genuinely positioned to win.

ANALYZE is about knowing yourself. REVEAL is about knowing your donors.

Analyze

When I was in my 20s, I spent a lot of my time in nonprofit offices, figuring out their challenges, facilitating strategic planning, or discussing fundraising strategies. I liked to ask executive directors, “who are your competitors?”

The answer was always the same “Oh, we don’t have competitors” OR “Oh I don’t really know.” Nonprofits are too nice.

It’s ok to acknowledge that you compete for the same dollars and that there are things that make you better than your competition. It’s even better to get specific.

What makes your organization compelling?  It’s four things.

1. What you do well

Everyone can say they provide 'evidence-based mental health services.' That means nothing.

What you need is something like: 'We use peer-led navigation where people with lived experience of mental health challenges deliver services. Our data shows 3x higher engagement rates and 78% appointment adherence compared to 24% with traditional clinical outreach.'

Specific and measurable. Impossible for a competitor to copy-paste.

2. What funders want

You might do amazing work, but if funders are going in a different direction, you're running the steeplechase (look it up!), while everyone else gets to stay dry.

Look at donor 990s. Read their annual reports. Pay attention to their language.

If every foundation in health equity is talking about 'community-driven solutions' and 'centering lived experience,' but your model is clinical and provider-led, you have a positioning problem.

You can either reframe your work to show how it aligns with what funders want, or find different funders who value what you actually do. Both are valid strategies. What doesn't work is ignoring what funders care about.

3. What your competition isn’t doing

When I was at RTI, our major health governance competi-peer focused heavily on online training, tools, and cross-country cohorts.

We went the other direction. Bespoke models, strong political economy analysis, and in-depth expert analysis and advice. That approach didn’t scale quite as well, but we didn’t want scale. We wanted impact.

Zig when others zag, I say. Fill a gap. Find your niche.

4. What your community needs

I mentioned political economy analysis earlier: that’s one way to identify your community needs, and the drivers behind the challenges your community faces. Being able to say that you analyzed the data, talked to people, and understand not just how things work, but WHY they work, is often the difference between a credible, winning proposal, and one that doesn’t quite get across the finish line.

This isn’t a proposal story, but it’s indicative. I once launched a project thinking I was building an IT solution to help a government agency better manage it’s workflow. I was wrong. After talking to the community they served, I realized that the problem wasn’t a technology one, it was trust. So we pivoted the project to support trust building between the agency and their clients, driving service usage from 1 or 2 cases a month to dozens.

ANALYZE isn't about writing your mission statement better or more clearly. It's about an honest self, community, donor, and competitive assessments. What do we do better than anyone else? What do funders actually care about right now? What gaps exist in how our competitors serve communities? What does our community need that they're not getting?

Next up: REVEAL. How do you find funders who actually care about that difference?

Introducing ARCH

Most nonprofits treat grant development like a sprint. 

They see an RFP and take off running at full speed. A fury of activity commences and five minutes before the deadline, they hit submit…breaking the tape just in time.

Then they stop running and wander around the track aimlessly, with their hands on their heads.

A month or two, or sometimes 24 goes by, and an award notification (or loss letter :/) comes, and it all begins again.  No learning; no growth. Just motion.

But growth isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon. 20,000 steps in a repeatable, defined order, while closely managing effort.

One of my favorite running quotes is, “A runner is a miser, spending the pennies of his energy with great stinginess.”

Growth is similar. We expend our energy wisely. Each activity needs a purpose.

In 20 years at nonprofits, I helped raise over $400M for health, nutrition, and governance programs, all without working too many weekends, and revising my application for the 27th time.

We had a systematic approach that I’ve adapted to help nonprofits structure their grant development.  I call it ARCH:

ANALYZE - Understanding makes your organization different

REVEAL - Identifying donor and community needs and how to frame impact

CRAFT - Writing proposals that inspire

HONE - Learning from every proposal

Most nonprofits skip straight to CRAFT. Find RFP, write response, repeat. Beautiful proposals that chase the wrong funders, highlighting programs that don't differentiate them.

Over the next few weeks, I'm breaking down each piece of ARCH: what it is, why it matters, how to use it.

First up: ANALYZE. What makes your organization genuinely different? Why YOU?

As my uncle would say, it helps to think like an investor, not a do-gooder.

Foundation Search

I thought most nonprofits would have a pipeline of grants they were ready to write. I’d come in and help them figure out an approach, think through how they’d execute it, develop some strong alignment with donor missions, and write some high-quality grants.

Fun fact: No.

Discussions typically start with “we do cool thing x, y, and z; can you help us find funding for our cool things?”

Which, cool things are awesome…but I can think of a lot of cool things that never attract funding.

So, I looked at a number of foundation search options. GrantStation? Expensive. Grantseeker.io? Expensive. Candid? Very expensive.

As it turns out, most of these databases are just a fancy UI around public (inscrutable, but yes, public) IRS Form 990s.

Cue these organizations yelling at me “but we provide AI writing tools, bespoke integration, and checklists!!!” Nah, everyone uses them for donor research.

So uh, instead of paying for this, I downloaded all the 2025 IRS Form 990s from the IRS website. Now these are just text documents that you can only read in Notepad. They aren’t searchable, they aren’t cleaned, etc. The IRS just dumps them out on their website.

100,000s of nonprofits. Millions of rows. BUT, I just need the foundations, not every nonprofit in the country. So I figure out the python code to sort them. 25,000! That’s manageable. However…

I know nothing. I think I can just upload all these to copilot and tell it to search them.

Nope, wrong. That doesn’t work. AI doesn’t search like google. It takes chunks and outputs a “plausible answer”. That won’t fly.

Build a csv file with all the data? Millions upon millions of rows. Computer crashes.

Create thousands of csv files with the data? Still not searchable. Oh, and it lost critical data because the text files aren’t regularly formatted.

So then I create a single csv file with only the fields that I selected from these text files, and this morning I loaded it into Postgres.

Success!

Now I can query every single grant made by a foundation that filed with the IRS in 2025.

Long story short, private foundations gave over 600,000 grants last year.

If you are one of the 62 private foundations that gave grants related to basket weaving last year, it’s in my database. Perhaps you’d like to fund more basket weaving work?

And if you have a nonprofit and would like to know which foundations fund organizations like yours, reach out. Have I got a database for you.

Effective Writing

Who, what, when where, why.  The 5 Ws.  Everyone knows them.

These are the basic questions to analyze the critical details of any story.

What is a proposal, if not a story?

It’s a story of who we are and where we want to go. In a proposal, we are asking someone else, another organization, to take that journey with us.

To win funding, you need to clearly explain:

WHO you are.

WHAT you do.

WHEN you do the work.

WHERE you work.

WHY you exist.

To these five questions, add three more: HOW you work, your RESULTS, and SO WHAT.

You can use this framework to write a description of your organization, a project summary, and yes, a grant proposal.

Let’s say we want to create an acute care community health outreach project in Tanzania. It would look like this:

(Why/so what) Emergency care is unavailable in rural areas, and most people live far from hospitals. By collaborating with community health workers to learn first aid and develop locally-appropriate transportation plans to hospitals, people in rural areas are stabilized and moved to hospitals with emergency care, improving their health outcomes.

(When/who/where/what) With your foundation’s help, Cadence Advisory will collaborate with district health staff, health facility leadership, and local organization X in Singida Rural District to train 120 community health workers on emergency first aid, job aids, first aid kits, and transportation information to strengthen access to emergency care.

(How) Cadence will train CHWs in an intensive one-week course held by our Clinical Officer. Topic areas include bleeding control, splints, stabilization, safe transport, and equipment use using WHO-approved tools and job aids. Our Clinical Officer will conduct quarterly mentoring visits with each CHW to check quality of care, knowledge, and troubleshoot challenges.

(Results) The 120 trained CHWs will provide first aid and safe transport for 1,000 people in the first year.

This framework seems easy. But everyone wants to explain the “what”.  The gap is explaining the “how”.

Funders want to know that you understand how to carry out the work, not just that you understand the why and the what.

New Beginnings

One thing they don't tell you about starting something new: You get to be your own IT Director, Finance Director, Ops Manager, Technical Advisor, and BD Director! And yet, you also HAVE to be all of those things.

For example, which CRM platform should you use? Salesforce is too built out for what I need, but there's at least 5-6 others I could use. How do you decide?

Accounting software? Quickbooks, yes? Also an expensive subscription. There are a variety of other free/low cost options depending on what you need, with different tiers and products.

Bank? Local credit union or giant conglomerate. Benefits and downsides to both!

Cloud services? Microsoft? Google? AWS?

Meeting platform? Teams? Google Meet? Zoom?

Invoicing and billing? Wave, Zelle, and Melio are all options with varying fees and structures, especially if you're invoicing small NGOs rather than large government contractors.

Some of these systems integrate with each other. Some don't.

Each of these choices lock you into a particular ecosystem and if they don't talk to each other, now you've made your life harder rather than easier.

So if you ever wonder why every large government contractor just uses whatever terrible thing Oracle developed, I get it now. Path dependency and integration...UX be damned.

Welcome to my Ted Talk. :)

Blogs will go here!

My blog will feature thoughts on organizational growth, grant writing and public health. In the meantime, please find my old Medium account here.