OneNote can be accessed through Microsoft 365 or by logging in to. However, the structure below might serve as an inspiration and help you visualize your ideal notebook layout.īefore we review our sample notebook, we’ll cover the basics of OneNote, including where and how to access it and some of its core features. Depending on your organization’s culture, the team you are working with, and your specific proposal development needs, your notebook could end up looking very different from ours. To introduce you to using OneNote as a proposal management tool, we’re going to walk you through a sample notebook structure that you can use to develop your next grant proposal. And even if you are familiar with OneNote, you may use it primarily to store personal notes and not as a project management tool.

If you are not familiar with OneNote, it may not be immediately clear how to use it to develop and manage a grant proposal. But OneNote has several advantages in addition to being free, including how well it integrates with other Microsoft applications like Outlook and Teams, and how accessible it is: If your organization uses Microsoft 365, OneNote is included in the suite of tools, making it easy to adopt for managing proposal development tasks. With so many new and popular options, it’s easy to forget about OneNote. Since OneNote made its debut, many other digital notebooks and collaborative tools have come out, such as Evernote, Notion, and Asana. While there are many tools to choose from, one readily accessible (and free!) tool that you can use to manage and write a grant proposal is Microsoft OneNote.

Managing each of these stages requires a system of some kind and one or more tools to save content and permit collaborative development of the proposal.

There’s the research stage when you are learning about the funder’s interests, studying the proposal requirements, and collecting background information related to your topic the outline stage, when you are deciding the proposal’s structure, developing the outline, and determining which content goes where the writing phase, when you are drafting text and finally, the submission phase, when you are editing the proposal, completing the final reviews, and collating all the required pieces. Writing a grant proposal has several stages.

Onenote example notebooks