I was giving a little talk yesterday about writing grant proposals when something slipped out that surprised even me. I said, “I think I was successful in my last grant competition because of the strong appendix I attached.”

I did a mental double take. Did I just say I won a competitive grant with the appendix to the proposal?  I thought further: I did a good job writing the body of the proposal. And I always corroborate staff qualifications in the appendix.

But this grant paid for “capacity building” (training in running a nonprofit), and we were quite experienced and very well-qualified. So I used the appendix for more than verification. I took advantage of the extra pages to demonstrate in detail all the ways my organization had “been there and done that.”

One of the most convincing documents had to be the table of contents from a capacity-building manual we used when training nonprofit groups throughout the state. I also listed the dates, places and the participating nonprofits.

In addition, I supplied a list of dates and topics each of our staff members provided to their constituencies. Training topics addressed by our partner for the grant were also appended.

I showed how we were ready to hit the ground running with results of a recent survey we conducted asking nonprofits what types of training they needed.

In all, I included nine optional attachments each identified by a letter from “A” to “I.” The letters helped draw attention in the proposal’s table of contents and served to identify each attachment in references made within the proposal.

After yesterday’s talk, I remembered another successful proposal. Much of the data in it came from a door-to-door survey. Naturally, a summary of the complete survey was appended to the proposal. Hmmmm . . . maybe that appendix won us the grant.