Is grant writing the same as commercial RFP writing?
The preparation is the same. Determining if to proceed, if you believe you are qualified and can deliver what is being asked for or more by the customer, reading the requirements, understanding the audience that will evaluate your responses, assessing your company’s SWOTs in preparing responses, preparing the response strategy and team and preparing the steps, milestones and due dates are among the common prep work activities for each.
The analytics are the same… keeping track of internal deliverables, correlating time and effort in assessing the win/loss and ROI of the processes and responses and soliciting customer feedback that can improve future responses.
There are even synonymous and interchangeable terms, e.g., Capture Team, Deal Team, Red Team, etc.
The above may be an over-simplification of the work involved in preparing grants and responding to municipal and commercial RFPs and, certainly, different details are needed. But, given the purpose of grants and RFPs, i.e., establishing a foundation by which the parties can easily work together, the commonalities suggested here do frame the work that is produced.
Am I over-simplifying this?
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