Here's how you can improve your grant writing skills to increase funding for your organization.

It's a fierce competition. Nothing seems to be a rule. Knowledge of donors is of no relevance. Screening is done by some desk person. Donors come much late. They have hired layes or some people for this job. One should make the best proposal with authentic data . Writing is a skill. Everybody cannot write.

Go after funding opportunities based on how good of a fit they are for your programs, not only on how much money is available. Do your research and see if any other nonprofit organizations operate projects similar to the one you want to develop. Use citations in your grant proposals. Use specific language in your grant writing proposals. Do not use flowery language. The rule of thumb is to have a maximum of three objectives Do not save the budget for last.

The essence of researching the funders is to have full spectrum of what the funders need and compare from what your organisation have. Some areas of concentration on your research are: is there a template for proposal or not, the funding limit, geographical area of application, area or sector of intervention, organisation maturity etc. All these and many other appears to be very crucial to the funders during selection stage. So make sure you match with your funders before developing any proposal.

Any effective bid must tell the story of your organisation and its work/project proposal in a way that provides an emotive reason to care and also clearly evidences that a real need exists. This requires the careful use of emotionally focused stories (short case studies/testimonials etc.) plus hard facts and figures both from within and outside your organisation that irrefutably demonstrate need. Critically all this must link back to the prospective funders' aims/objectives and desired outcomes rather than just those of your organisation.

Review and eding the proposal before sending to the funders is among underrated step in grant writing. Most of us we believe what we wrote in first place is appealing and perfect. I recommend two methods in here. 1) find reviewers at leat two, subject area expert reviewer and language expert reviewer 2) do self review at least two times, first after completing the proposal and second leave the proposal at least 12 to 72 hours and come back and review it. This will help you to refresh your mind, and trust me you will see what you thought completed appealing proposal as not written by you

Get feedback on your past proposals that were not accepted! Unless a funder explicitly says they won’t give feedback, ask for this feedback! You deserve it. Be kind, personable, and say something like: "We are sorry to receive the decline notice, but certainly understand that funds are limited and hard decisions always have to be made. Would you or a colleague have a few minutes to jump on a call in the coming weeks to share specific feedback on our proposal? Your feedback would be immensely valuable for us to strengthen our proposals in the future, as well as identify if [funder name] is a good fit for a [your org name] proposal in the future. (We really want to make sure we are using our limited grant writing resources effectively.)"

Use GenAI, your competitors are. There are many complaints that GenAI is too generic which is warranted. Find a platform that allows you to upload your own documents and then upload 5 to 10 of your best grant proposals that secured you the grant. Then upload the grant application. Now create a simply BotStack, User Perplexity to provide a summary of the granting foundation / organization. Then ask the NonProfit Grant Writer AI Helper to use your previous grants as a guide to write a first draft of your grant proposal. You can then ask Claude or GPT4o to provide edits and recommendations. Now in minutes you have a first draft that sounds like your previous successful grants.