Stop 5 of 8 · Later
The grant
The funder's criteria become the outline, the narrative is written against the scoring, and the reviewer's objections get answered before a reviewer raises them.
Sixty pages, once a year, on top of everything else
The federal grant is due in March. It is worth three years of a programme Reyes has wanted since the last budget cycle, and it arrives as a notice of funding opportunity that runs to sixty pages of criteria, certifications, formats and deadlines. Reyes writes it in the evenings between a council meeting and a shift bid.
Nothing in the application is case data. It is need, programme design, budget, evaluation and certifications, which is exactly the kind of writing Claude is good at when it is pointed at the right target.
| Stage | What Claude does | What Reyes does |
|---|---|---|
| Rubric map | Turns the notice into a scored checklist | Confirms the deadlines and the eligibility |
| Narrative | Drafts section by section against the rubric | Supplies the published figures |
| Budget | Builds the table and the justification lines | Fills the numbers with finance |
The notice, turned into a checklist
Attached is the funding notice. Give me a table of every scored criterion: the criterion, the points, the page or word limit, and exactly what the notice says a reviewer is looking for. Then a second list of everything that is required but not scored, such as certifications, letters, formats and registrations, with its deadline. Flag anything that has to be requested from another office and how long that usually takes. [upload the funding notice]
Section by section, against the points
Draft the need statement for this application, against the criterion and the points in row one of that table. Use only figures I supply and leave a clearly marked placeholder wherever a figure is needed, saying which figure and from which published source. No adjectives about the seriousness of the problem, just the numbers and what they mean for a city of our size. Stay inside the word limit and tell me the count.
The budget table Reyes fills
Build the budget table this notice requires, with the funder's own categories and column headings. For every line, write the justification sentence the notice asks for, with a bracketed placeholder for the figure and the source I have to pull from finance. Add a column showing which scored criterion each line supports. Then list the costs this notice does not allow, so I do not build the programme around one.
The reviewer who is not on your side
Read this draft as a federal reviewer scoring it against the rubric, who reads forty of these and is looking for reasons to score down. For each criterion, the score you would give, the sentence that cost the points, and the specific objection. Then the five questions you would ask if you could. Do not rewrite anything, and do not be encouraging.