You know your program well. You've watched it run, you know what the staff do on a busy afternoon and you know why participants keep coming back. The trouble starts when you have to explain it to strangers in a few pages, because everything that feels obvious to you is missing from the page.
If a reviewer can't picture an ordinary Tuesday in your program, they can't score it well. This article shows how to describe the work so a stranger can follow it: who, what, where, when and how, then the work plan, the reasoning behind your approach, your staffing and what continues after the grant.
Answer who, what, where, when and how
Start with the basics, and be more specific than feels necessary. A reviewer needs to be able to answer these without guessing:
- Who is served, how many, and how they find out about the program or are recruited.
- What they receive: sessions, services, materials, referrals.
- Where it happens: a site, a school, a home visit, an online platform.
- How often and for how long: twice a week for twelve weeks, one visit a month for a year.
- Who delivers it, and what they do.
Here is a hypothetical example. Say a small organization runs a job-readiness program for adults leaving a county jail.
Vague: Participants receive comprehensive workforce services, including coaching and training.
Pictureable: Participants meet their job coach at our downtown office within a week of release. Over twelve weeks they attend two three-hour workshops a week on résumés, interviews and workplace communication, and meet one-on-one with their coach every other week. In weeks nine to twelve, the coach arranges interviews with three employers who have agreed to consider our graduates.
The second version has no extra claims. It just says what happens, in order. A reviewer can see participants arriving, sitting in a workshop and walking into an interview. Tell the same story for your program: the first contact, the middle of the service and the point where a participant leaves.
Check the notice for how it organizes this material. Federal funding notices have a Program Description section, and agencies sometimes ask for the narrative under set headings. If so, use their headings and their order.
Build a work plan and timeline
The work plan turns the description into a schedule. A simple table does the job:
| Quarter | Milestone | Responsible |
|---|---|---|
| Q1 | Hire job coach; finalize employer agreements | Program director |
| Q1–Q2 | Recruit and enroll first cohort of 20 | Job coach |
| Q2 | First cohort completes workshops | Job coach |
| Q3 | Second cohort begins; mid-year review of results | Program director, evaluator |
| Q4 | Third cohort begins; final data collection | Job coach |
Three habits make a timeline credible:
- Tie it to the period of performance. Under 2 CFR 200.1, that is the time between the start and end date of the federal award. A work plan that needs 14 months of activity in a 12-month award tells the reviewer you haven't read the notice.
- Build in start-up time. Hiring, contracting and recruiting each take weeks or months. A plan that has participants enrolled on day one assumes none of that happens. Quarter one in the table above is mostly set-up, and that's honest.
- Name an owner for each milestone. A role is enough. "The team" is not.
Explain why this approach
Reviewers want to know why you chose this approach over others. There are three kinds of reasons, and the strongest proposals use more than one:
- Evidence. Research or evaluation that shows the approach works, or that the components of it do.
- Your own record. Results from earlier cohorts, pilot data, participant feedback.
- Fit. How you adapted the model for the community you serve, and who helped shape it.
On evidence, the U.S. Department of Education's regulations show how one funder thinks about it. In 34 CFR 77.1 the Department defines levels: strong evidence, moderate evidence, promising evidence and a weaker category it calls "demonstrates a rationale," which means a key project component in the logic model is supported by citations of high-quality research or evaluation findings that suggest it is likely to significantly improve relevant outcomes. Other funders use different language, but the idea carries over. Be clear about what you can claim. A published evaluation of the exact model is one thing. A few studies on a related approach is another. Say which you have.
If your evidence is thin, don't stretch it. Say what you have, say why the approach is reasonable and tell the reviewer how your evaluation will add to what's known. The article on goals, objectives and outcomes shows how to connect the approach to measurable results, and evaluation plans for people who aren't evaluators shows how to describe the learning you will do.
Show staffing and capacity
Reviewers ask whether the people and the organization can carry out what you've described. Cover:
- Who does what. Key personnel, their roles and their qualifications.
- How much time. The share of each person's time committed to the project. A program director listed at 5 percent of their time who is also named the day-to-day lead invites doubt.
- How the organization supports them. Supervision, training, systems, space.
Keep these consistent with the budget. If the narrative describes a half-time coach and the budget funds a quarter of one, a careful reviewer will notice. See key personnel for how to present the team.
Be honest about what continues
Close the design with what happens after the grant: what continues, who pays for it and what stops. Specific beats vague.
Vague: We will seek additional funding to sustain the program.
Specific: Employer partners have agreed to co-fund the job coach position at 25 percent in year two. The remaining cost will be moved into the operating budget over three years, and we will seek renewal funding in year three.
Say what you will do if the money doesn't come through, too. A short, realistic answer builds more trust than a promise that everything continues. More on this in sustainability after the grant.
Your next step
Describe one week of your program in a single paragraph that a stranger could follow: who arrives, what happens, who is there and what changes by Friday. Hand it to someone outside your program and ask them to retell it. Wherever their retelling goes wrong is where your proposal will lose a reviewer.
SoliContraX can draft a program narrative from the materials you upload, so the clearer your descriptions, the better the starting point. Start your next application.