Since I only worked on the budget portion of our grant, I got to make limited writing choices. However, since the Gannett Foundation’s outline for a grant application was so loose I was able to choose what format I wanted to use. I did a lot of research trying to figure out what the best format for a grant’s organization budget was, and I ended up picking the one that looked the most polished and professional. Originally I had tried to make a table to contain the information, but I couldn’t work that out so I just went with the columns instead. Unfortunately I had to leave a number of sections blank where I didn’t know NICE’s finances, but this is understandable as I do not have access to the information an employee would have.
I wanted this section of the grant to look like it was done by a professional. The clean, even the layout helps to create that look. The audience will certainly have seen its fair share of grant proposals. By aligning mine with the information I found about the typical structure of an organization budget, I was aligning my work with the type of grant proposal that the people at the Gannett Foundation are used to reading. I was trying to move beyond being a student writer and into being a professional writer.
Read the grant proposal to the Gannett Foundation here