Becoming a Grant Portal Pro
The most exciting part of a grant application is pressing the “Send” or “Submit” button in hopes your hard work will result in a successful proposal. For some applications, funders require you to submit your proposal through their granting portal, which can be an unfamiliar place but a necessary part of the process nonetheless. Becoming a “portal pro” involves knowing how to troubleshoot and anticipate any technical issues in the portal, and even more so, making sure you have plenty of time to insert your application into the portal.
As self-proclaimed “portal pros” ourselves, we have put together some considerations for successfully navigating different funding portals.
Set up your account and login information well in advance. We suggest setting up an account right away and do some exploring to get familiar with the system. Creating your account may also require setting up an “organizational profile” which can take a bit of time to curate. You don’t want to encounter any unexpected surprises on deadline day while trying to access your portal account.
Once logged in, check the portal for important information like word counts, attachment requirements (such as naming conventions or accepted files types), and signature requirements (for example, is it a checkbox or do you need an electronic signature?).
When developing your proposal, refrain from doing so directly in the portal. Portals are often not designed for users to easily edit, format, and review their work. Instead, we recommend creating an application template in a separate document to organize and keep track of any necessary changes. If you do decide to develop your proposal directly in the portal, make sure you can save your work and continue working at a later time.
In portals, sometimes the spaces where you enter information can be a bit finicky and temperamental. To avoid any unexpected challenges, test the formatting before deadline day. For example, do you lose your formatting when you copy and paste from a template into the portal? Is your content still organized and legible after you copy and paste it? And are word counts the same as what shows in your template document?
Make sure you have all the application questions by testing each field. You should be able to see most of the application questions in the portal; however, sometimes there are extra questions depending on your answers to previous ones. Typically, this happens with questions that give you the option to choose “yes” or “no”. To test this, check to see if answering “yes” to a question triggers more questions. In doing so, it will ensure you answer all of the necessary questions during your preparation work.
Keep in mind that every portal is unique and requires slightly different formats. This is part of the reason that patience, preparation, and portals are closely tied together. We hope these tips will help you to take on any portal and submit your applications with ease.