While I have not seen formal research on where a person’s eye travels when they first read a grant proposal, I paid attention to my habits and have generalized them to assist our clients. Ironically, if you understand how to speed read, you will also have clues about how to position your information so that it has the most dramatic impact on the reader.
For example, in most of the grant proposals that we write, we include photos. Part of the reason we do this is that photos subconsciously send a powerful message about the quality of your non-profit and your attention to detail. Accordingly, I like to find the best lit, best focused, and most contemporary photos I can find off the internet or from the collection established by the non-profit itself.
What people may not realize, however, is that I am betting that people are more likely to read the captions under the photos than the text of the document itself. Consequently, I make the caption extremely easy to read and I build into it the most powerful, compelling message associated with that charity.
I also assume that people will be more likely to read your footnotes than your actual grant application. For this reason, I pay great attention to the footnotes, seeking to make them readable, persuasive, recent, and consistent with the winning message/image of the non-profit organization.
Assuming that people scan headlines in a grant application just as they scan headlines in a newspaper or on a website, I also pay particular attention to making sure that each headline is catchy, interesting, and consistent with the non-profit’s overall winning message. I have found it helps to spice up the headline by adding a little alliteration, a reference to a current movie or television show, or an interesting play on words.
No matter what, I assume that the reader will most likely be scanning my application, looking for excuses to turn it down, and that the best way to win their support it to seed the most compelling messages into the portions
