Creating the Content Table for the Grant Proposal Generator

My first challenge was to identify the comprehensive set of information items that would cover all the questions asked by foundations in their grant application forms. I started with the most comprehensive single form I could find: the one used by the Catalogue of Philanthropy, a Washington D.C. organization, to vet charities in the D.C. region for inclusion in their publication.

I decided based on my initial assessment that a table was the right shape for this information, and that I would use Excel to create my table.

I used the questions as the row labels, and created columns for the various types of proposals a charity would typically generate.

When a charity makes a grant request they must declare how the money will be used. Is it for general operating support? Or is is for a specific program or project? If it is for a specific program, which one? Once the intended use is declared, all of the following questions must be answered with that end use in mind. Some of the answers, like contact information, will be the same for both general support and specific programs, but many will be very different. To accommodate this variation, I setup separate columns to represent the various versions of the proposals. A charity will fill out a project-specific column for each project that requires funding.

I also setup separate columns for long and short form answers. This is necessary because many online application forms limit the number of words for each response. The approach I envisioned here is that the long form would be written first - it's easier to be wordy - and then a short, pithy version crafted next.

I started with the Catalogue for Philanthropy questions, which are in white. The next application form I reviewed was the Washington Regional Association of Grantmakers "Common Application", and the incremental questions from that were color-coded in yellow. I proceeded in this way, selecting application forms from large foundations, adding any new questions I found and color-coding them to show the source. As I had hoped, after only a handful of forms, the number of new questions dwindled to one or two per foundation. This consistency is important, because it confirms that an automated approach is truly possible! After reviewing five sources, the total number of information items was 130, with about 50 related to financial numbers.

At the same time I was creating the Content Table I was also working on the Sequencing Table, the other knowtifact required for the Grant Composer to work. I'll describe the Sequencing Table in my next post.