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Accurately identifying the problem or need your organization wants to tackle is the single most important factor in developing a powerful grant proposal.

Federal resources and systems for grantseekers have been changing. If your organization participates in the federal grants process or plans to, it’s imperative to stay on top of developments at Grants.gov, SAM.gov, and the federal agencies with which you are most involved.

It’s a well-accepted best practice that the development of grant proposals should be well coordinated with the administrative, financial, human resources, and programmatic functions of the organization.

Supervising any high-level staff member is a balancing act. Star performers need leeway, appropriate decision-making authority, and a degree of flexibility about when and how they work. Hold the reins too tight and you’ll stifle them. But if you hold the reins too loose, you can lose control of the organizational functions they handle.

Is your organization’s grants specialist constantly frazzled, working nights and weekends and juggling a schedule bulging with proposal deadlines, program development meetings, and report due dates? Do other staff members tip-toe around the specialist’s desk, forgiving occasional expletives, ignoring the candy wrappers and dirty coffee cups, and excusing missed calls and meetings. If so, that’s a big red flag.

A successful grant proposal sorts the details and moving parts of a complex plan into a precise description of how things will work. It’s somewhat like writing a brief explanation of how a Rube Goldberg machine works! Each piece of the plan must be distinctly articulated and the connections between pieces must be clear.”

Grants are social investments that are intended to produce positive change. Defining intended change is easier for some types of programs than others. If you’re working to improve the health of diabetics, the proposed outcome may be a specific degree of decrease in blood sugar levels of participants. But grantseekers often get confused when developing outcomes for programs that are intended to stop something from happening in the first place.

Before you can manage government grants successfully, you’ve got to untangle a snarl of red tape.

The ubiquitous use of “we will” in grant proposals paves the way for grant-management nightmares. When the grant proposal does not assign tasks to specific positions, those tasks usually fall by the wayside when the intense work of program start-up gets underway. Here are a few examples of important tasks that often end up unassigned.