By Collin Lessing, JVA Consulting

Sometimes, the best lessons are the ones you learn when luck is your side.

Recently, I was getting ready to begin work on a grant proposal that required me to use an online grant form. I have worked in a ton of online grant application forms in my role at JVA, but I had never seen this particular form.

Normally, when working on a grant application using an online form, I copy the headings of each section onto a Word document and work within that for my draft. It makes it easier to share the document with others who need to review the grant, allowing them to incorporate their own comments and changes and also to make sure that I’ve answered all of the questions exactly as the funder has written them. After the draft is final, I paste all text onto the online form. This time, however, by some random chance, I started writing directly onto the electronic form—something I never do.

It was at this moment I realized that this particular online form would not allow you to copy or paste text on it! It would have been a complete disaster if I had written the grant narrative in a Word document with the plans of pasting the text onto the form later. This would have forced me to type the narrative twice! Chalk it up to my lucky day.

My grant writing lesson of the day: always test out the functionality of an online grant application before you begin writing your draft.