How can you write a grant proposal that prioritizes funding for women-led organizations?

Stay faithfull to your own vision and misson, values etc. Ensure a genuine match between the financer and yourself. otherwise, do not ask for funding to that financer.

Funders are not elves. Beyond the buzz around mission and vision, a gleaming pitch decks, getting a project funded requires clear understanding of the capital required, disbursement schedule and unequivocal commitment to the return on invest in any value agreed upon.

The story is always secondary to proper market testing. We're dealing with business here not novels, and any person pitching into a project enjoys a story, but if in the right mind will support it when it is confirmed to be true.

Collect women’s views, ideas, aspirations and particular needs from grassroots and leadership levels through consultations. Views, ideas, reds to he tackled and potential solutions to work on can be identified. Together, needs for ensuring smoothly and meaningfully women involvement will be identified in the process. Consequently, measures for ensuring efficient and meaningful women participation within the proposal’s target group’s dinamics can be included. Therefore, a women consultation process ensures a well informed proposal on what is needed to be tackled “now” and what ideas women would like to include on the program and tells what’s needed for improving future women effective participation in the proposal’ matters.

Understand the donor(s) and tailor your proposal to each one of them. A donor who already understands the work of women’s organizations will require a different proposal than a donor who is just looking for interesting proposals.

Budgeting and forecasting is one of the greatest sources of error. Getting it wrong normally costs the project significantly and at times error can be so crippling in startup phases that an entrepreneur into serious difficulty. My advice is simple: let the professionals support the budgeting process: they will bring in the experience of many successes and failures and will most certainly get it right.

Reviewing a proposal has nothing to do with male or female. I cannot understand why we seem to be sexualizing even this component of developing a business. Reviewing a proposal, a business plan or indeed anything you output to investors or other senior individuals is a basic rule for attracting interest in what you’re proposing as well as demonstrating professionalism. The four eyes rule applies here too.