How to Write a Winning Project Proposal
A project proposal needs to answer three important questions: Why important, why now, and why you?
No matter your profession, you may find yourself proposing a project to someone—a funding agency, your supervisor, or a colleague.
Throughout my career I’ve been writing proposals, from graduate fellowship research proposals to proposals to industry partners and funding agencies. For academic researchers in particular, writing research proposals is part and parcel of the job: It is the process by which researchers obtain funding to hire graduate students and obtain the resources they need to complete their research. Over the past 20 years of writing proposals (and nearly as long reading and reviewing proposals), I’ve learned a few things about what works well.
You may not be writing an academic research proposal, but many of the same tenets and lessons do hold across different kinds of proposals. This post outlines some common strategies and tactics for writing a project proposal—and, why even if your proposal doesn’t “win”, the process itself is still incredibly integral to your project’s progress.
