Part III — Funder-Specific Strategies

Because NIH ≠ NSF ≠ foundations ≠ government ≠ small business ≠ international.

The universal principles of Part II — alignment, evidence, clarity, the reviewer as audience — hold everywhere. But every major funder type expresses those principles through its own culture, format, vocabulary, and unwritten rules. An NIH study section and a family foundation board are both made of humans deciding what to fund, yet a proposal that wins one would baffle the other. Part III teaches you to translate your draft into the dialect of the funder you are actually approaching.

Each chapter stands largely on its own; read the ones that match your target funder and skim the rest for perspective (seeing how other funders think sharpens how you write for yours).

  • Chapter 16 — NIH Grants: the largest biomedical funder in the world — institutes and study sections, the mechanism zoo (R01, R21, F31, K), 1–9 scoring and paylines, and the NIH-specific components from rigor and reproducibility to data-sharing.
  • Chapter 17 — NSF Grants: fundamental research across the sciences — directorates, the two review criteria (Intellectual Merit and the Broader Impacts that trip up so many scientists), and the CAREER award.
  • Chapter 18 — Foundation Grants: private philanthropy, where the relationship often matters as much as the document — the letter of inquiry, the 990, and the program officer as partner.
  • Chapter 19 — Government Grants: the broader federal and state landscape — DOE, USDA, ED, SAMHSA, HUD and more — and the compliance-heavy culture of public money.
  • Chapter 20 — SBIR/STTR: federal innovation funding for small businesses, where grant writing meets business planning and you must make a commercial case.
  • Chapter 21 — International and Multilateral Funding: USAID, the World Bank, UN agencies, and the European Commission, where local partnership and monitoring-and-evaluation move to the center.

Use these chapters to retrofit the draft you built in Part II to your funder's exact format and review criteria. Your Project Checkpoint here is to tailor your proposal to the specific funder you chose in Chapter 3.

Chapters in This Part