Most important element of a grant proposal.

 This last week was very interesting as my interaction with other professionals in the proposal development really yielded great and outstanding reports as such the answers to my simple question were gotten from three professionals.

Hamutal Gouri • An Isreali Citizen and Founder of Consult4good: she's commited to using her professional skills to promote social change, equality and justice. With more than 20 years of experience as a project manager, consultant to social change groups and progressive foundations and as a certified group facilitator, She has a rich experience in planning and facilitating training workshops, specializing in social marketing, donor relations and effective presentations.
 Her answer was simple:
 What a great question! Foundations' officers and public officials recieve and read humdreds - if not thousands - of grant proposals every year. When you've read that many proposals, you learn to read between lines and beyond the standart grant-writing launguage. When I read a proposal I look for the following, not necessarily in that order:
1. Strong vision/mission statement: not what we want to do, but what we want to achieve;
2. Signs that the applicant is a"learning organization" - that its workplan is based on information and data gathered from its various stakeholders, that it has scanned well its environmnet, knows its potential partners, etc
3. Innovation and passion: non profit work is often challanging and cesific: I look for ways in which the applicant is seeking to overcome challanges using creative thinking and fostering passion and committment
4. "Walking the walk" - non profits often have lofty ideas and great values: I'm interested in seeing how they come to play in an applicant's organisational structure, models of work and interventions, participatory mechanisms, diversity, gender mainstreaming, etc
5. Professionalism: is the applicant offering models based on best practices?
6. Sustainability and community building: foundations and institutional grants can only account for part of the organizational budget. I would tend to give preference to applicants that invest in community building and grassroots fundraising to build long term sustainability

This is not an exhaustive list, but these are some of the components I look at when I read a proposal and when I train non profits in writing them.

 For Joseph Mayerhoff, the answer was succint enough to be cramed:

 Joseph Mayerhoff • As proprietor of Grant Write, I have been writing grant proposals for the past ten years. My view is that the most important part of the grant proposal is the budget. I believe that any good grant writer or general writer can write a needs statement or a proposal that is good enough to get a funder's interest, but I think they get turned off by "pie in the sky" budgets. Budgets need to be thorough and reasonable without being so low that the project cannot succeed and so high that the funder feels that it is being taken advantage of.

 More

From Jitesh Panda a development consultant with 17 years of experience in India, The three most important element of grant proposal would be - Relevance of the proposed intervention, Experience & expertise of the organization/individual seeking grant; and finally Budget/Financial Details. 

I hope this will suffice and help in directing you when next you focus your grant proposal. See you next time.