Proposal writing is not always easy. Everybody makes stupid mistakes sometimes, especially when they are just starting out. In this series, our experienced writers will share their worst fails in proposal writing and what they learned from them. Today, Eva shares another story from Nepal.
I was working with an organization in Nepal and we were preparing to apply for a small grant. The deadline was within my vacation time, so I knew early on that I would need to finish the entire proposal before I left the office. We worked very hard to complete everything before my vacation started and succeeded – the only steps were to print out the proposal and add the necessary official documents.
I left for my vacation confident that my assistant would be able to do the remaining tasks and that the proposal would be submitted in time. We still had three weeks left until the deadline, so I saw no problem in leaving it to my staff to collect the documents. I also left detailed instructions on how to go about it.
So I left for my vacation and my assistant was going to submit the proposal by the deadline. Just a week before it approached, I contacted her again to reassure that everything was going according to plan, and it was. I was going to be unreachable for the next week, so we talked through the timeline again. Everything seemed to be fine.
After I came back and had access to internet again, I found my mailbox full of emails from my assistant, growing more desperate with every message she sent me. She had wanted to submit the proposal before the deadline, but when she wanted to take copies of our legal documents to attach them to the proposal, she realized they were nowhere to be found. She tried to contact our Board but they were not aware of the urgency and thus did not react in time. With me not being present, she did not know what to do and the proposal was not submitted in the end. The deadline had passed and we missed it.
There are a couple of things I learned from this experience. First of all, writing the proposal is not the last step in the application process. I should have made sure that all the necessary documents are attached already, instead of leaving this to my assistant. Many times we underestimate the time these tiny last steps take and get thrown off schedule by them. Finding documents, formatting, collecting signatures – all these things take up more time than we usually think and should never be left to the last minute.
My other mistake was that I did not involve our entire team in the process of writing the proposal. Our Board did not know about this. I did not inform them because it was only for a small amount of money. If I had informed them or involved them in any way, they would have understood the urgency when my assistant contacted them and would have reacted more quickly.
Next time, I will definitely make sure that I submit a proposal before I go on vacation if I am in charge of it instead of leaving this task to someone else who is not as involved in the process as I am. Lesson learned!
Eva is based in Germany and has worked for nearly a decade with NGOs on the grassroots level in Nepal in the field of capacity development and promotion of sustainable agricultural practices. Before that, she worked in South America and Europe with different organizations. She holds a Ph.D. in geography and her field of research was sustainability and inclusion in development projects.
