Prerequisites

Grant writing has a reputation for being arcane — full of agency acronyms, budget arithmetic, and unwritten rules. It is not nearly as forbidding as it looks, and the prerequisites for this book are genuinely modest. This page helps you confirm you are ready and points you to quick preparation if you are not.

The One Real Prerequisite

You need a project, program, or idea that needs money. That is it. The entire book is built around helping you fund something real, and the progressive project asks you to choose that something in the first chapters. It can be a research study, a nonprofit program, a classroom initiative, an art project, a community intervention, a small-business innovation — anything genuine that you want funded.

If you do not yet have a specific project in mind, that is fine; Chapter 1 will help you choose one. But the book is far more valuable if you bring a real ambition to it rather than a hypothetical.

Skills You Should Have

Clear Written English

Grant writing is writing. You do not need to be a polished stylist, but you should be able to construct a clear paragraph, organize an argument, and revise your own prose.

Self-check: Can you take a muddled three-sentence idea and rewrite it so a stranger understands it on the first read? If yes, you are ready. If your writing makes people ask "wait, what are you actually proposing?", you will get the most from this book by pairing it with focused work on clarity — the DataField Technical Writing book is designed as exactly this preparation, and grant proposals are a form of technical writing.

📝 Note: Many of the most successful grant writers are not naturally gifted writers. They are disciplined revisers who learned a set of structures. This book teaches the structures. Bring the willingness to revise and you have enough.

Familiarity With Your Own Field or Sector

You need to know enough about your research area, program area, or art form to say what you want to do and why it matters. You do not need to be a senior expert — graduate students and first-time program staff write fundable proposals all the time — but the project has to be one you understand well enough to defend.

Self-check: Can you explain, to an intelligent person outside your field, what your project would do and why it is needed? You will get much better at this as you read, but you should be able to make a rough first attempt.

Comfort With Basic Arithmetic

Budgets involve percentages, multiplication, and addition — salary times effort, costs times years, subtotals times an indirect-cost rate. There is no advanced math anywhere in this book.

Self-check — can you do these?

  1. If a staff member earns \$60,000 a year and spends 25% of their time on a project, what is the salary charged to the project? *(Answer: \$15,000.)*
  2. If direct costs are \$100,000 and the indirect-cost rate is 30% of direct costs, what are the total costs? *(Answer: \$130,000.)*
  3. If a budget grows 3% each year, what is year two of a \$50,000 year-one budget? *(Answer: \$51,500.)*

If you can do these (a calculator is entirely allowed), you have all the math the book requires. If they gave you pause, do not worry — Chapter 11 teaches budgeting from scratch, step by step.

What You Do NOT Need

To be explicit about what is not required before starting:

  • No prior grant writing experience. The book starts from "what is a grant?" If you have written grants before, the early chapters will move quickly and the later ones will take you much further.
  • No budgeting or financial-management background. Budgets, indirect costs, cost-sharing, and budget justification are all taught from the ground up.
  • No knowledge of specific funders. Each major funder type — NIH, NSF, foundations, government agencies, SBIR/STTR, international funders — gets dedicated treatment that assumes no prior familiarity.
  • No nonprofit or academic credential. The book serves readers across every sector. Where a chapter is sector-specific, it says so, and you can prioritize the ones that fit you.
  • No statistics or research-methods training. Some chapters use data to establish need; where they do, the book explains what you need and points to resources, and the DataField statistics and data-science books are available if you want to go deeper.

A Realistic Word on Time

A competitive proposal is not written in a weekend, and this book will tell you so repeatedly. The most common, most preventable mistake in grant writing is starting too late. If you are reading this with a deadline in two weeks, read Chapters 1, 2, 5, and the component chapter you most urgently need, and accept that your next proposal will benefit more than this one.

If you are reading this with months before your deadline — which is where you want to be — you are in the ideal position. Work through the book and let your proposal grow alongside it.

Ready?

If you have a real project that needs funding, can write a clear paragraph, know your own field, and can multiply a salary by a percentage — you are ready.

Turn to Chapter 1.