You cannot pull statistics out of the sky.

As a former university professor and teacher, I let me students know this right away.

If you haven’t included citations, how do I not know you aren’t just making stuff up? On the other side, if you aren’t using citations, but clearly rewrite something from a source you are plagiarizing.

Eeek. Yes, that counts as an automatic failure for a university course, but it’s important not to plagiarize when writing grants, as well.

It’s safe to say that if you are copying and pasting from somebody else you should use quotation marks and give credit to where you got the information. This would ensure that you are not plagiarizing while giving credibility to outside sources. However, you can also paraphrase, which is you can summarize a source’s information in your own words. When you do this you also need to give credit to that source.

As you do your grant research you are going to run into awesome information and you need a place to track this information. You may not need all of it for the particular grant you are writing, but it could come in handy.

This is what it would look like:

Mayor Sally Cat stated that “getting transportation to supportive services is impossible without having reliable public transportation. I nearly got hit by a car as there are no sidewalks on the mile-long walk to the meeting house” (2017).

If you wanted to paraphrase you might put something like the following:

The Mayor has even reported that the roads are dangerous in Cat city and that the sidewalks cannot be navigated (Cat, 2017).

Now imagine NOT using the citations.

This would cause these statements (and credibility) to fall flat.

How do I know that what you are saying is accurate?

Utilizing simple reference points by using citations elevates your grants tremendously and also increases the professionalism of you as a grant writer because people know you are doing your research.

Now something fun that you can do in grant proposals is to add footnotes.

We’ll talk about that in a minute, but first, let’s talk about the entire enchilada.

#4: Where to Get Citations for Grant Proposals and How to Reference Citations

So where I am I getting that quote from Mayor Sally Cat or the year 2017?

Well, I may have gotten this in a personal interview, from an online article in a newspaper, or on a blog. In any case, the information you need to have changed based on where you got the information.

As you are writing your grant, you can easily copy and paste your blurbs and put them into the grant and then use a direct quotation with a citation or paraphrase and use your in-text citation.

The other thing that this can help with is if you have some information, but the blurb isn’t quite right. Go ahead and click on the URL and see if you can find anything else. This is way better than Googling it over again to try and find the right link you clicked on.

Of course, it is also good to create a bookmark for each grant you work on and save relevant pages under that bookmark. But do not rely on this as you may clear your cookies and have everything accidentally deleted and you will eventually get a new computer. Having electronic files is a more sure way to keep your data.

Footnotes. I love footnotes. I use these a lot, especially when for letters of support and when I can’t attach a bibliography.

Many grants, especially foundation grants, may not allow added attachments to your grant narrative. If you only have two or four pages, then you don’t want to use one of those pages for a bibliography. However, you can insert footnotes to still show your sources. So in the above example you would utilize the same quotation from the mayor and could include the last name and year, but directly after that in your Word document, click ‘References’ in your menu and click ‘Insert Footnote’ under footnotes. This will automatically include applying a tiny little number in your document and then include the same number in the footer portion of your Word doc. I recommend that you change the size to 8 or 10 pt. if you are pressed for space. This is awesome as it basically creates the bibliography for you within the Word document.

So what would you put in this footnote? You would put the same reference as you have in your excel sheet: Contributors name, year, the title of resource, main source, and URL. If you are including a bibliography/ works cited / Literature page, you don’t necessarily need a footnote. But if you are not including a resource, utilize footnotes.

Okay, there is a difference between some of these but sometimes these are used interchangeably for grants. Basically what you will do is have an attachment with all the information from your excel sheet, but you will not include your blurb. Now if the grant asked for a Literature Review, then you would include your blurb and any additional information on why you chose that source. But let’s keep it basic.

Here is what your bibliography would look like:

Cat, Sally. December 2017. “Sidewalk Trouble in Cat Town” Cat Gazette. www.catgazette.com/sidewalktrouble

Now here is one extra piece to do. If you are using the excel sheet before you transfer your information into a Word Doc bibliography click on the column for Contributor’s Name and Go to the “AZ Sort Filter” and click it. In this way, it will alphabetize all your sources automatically, because you do want your sources alphabetized in your bibliography. This will not put the order in which you used them in your document but will alphabetize them. This is what you want so that they can be easily referenced.

There it is. That is how to systematize your research, give credibility to your information, and to deliver a professional-looking grant. This will definitely give you a MAJOR edge to other grant applications that do not include sources or a bibliography!

#8: Summarize Citations in Grant Proposals