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 project plan template