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.