The nonprofit sector is fiercely competitive in the best of times. This is not the best of times. As federal funding has been scythed down, and state funding is likewise dwindling, the volume of applications arriving in grant makers’ inboxes has soared. Standing out in this context is not easy.

But the evaluation profession offers a tool that can help grant seekers to make their case better: with clarity and power.

After working in philanthropy for nearly three decades, I feel comfortable saying out loud that a painfully high percentage of grant applications present as long, convoluted, narrative case-making. This too-common format requires grant makers to perform a heavy cognitive lift in order to find even basic dynamics, facts, and causal chains.

The tool we use and recommend for strategy formulation, evaluation and case-making is a simple logic model with three components: inputs, outputs, and intended change, where inputs are the resources you expend to start or operate a program; outputs are transactional elements, crudely put, the things you ‘buy’ with your time and money; and change metrics are the point of it all.

The first three grants I ever wrote were all successful (I was soon disabused of the notion that grant writing was easy). They succeeded because they were clear, sharp, short, and relatively easy to comprehend. They succeeded because they captured, not just transactional outputs, but what we intended to change — all in a logic chain that convinced these three foundations that our theory of change was sensible and achievable.

The organization in question is a disability sports foundation. Its grants had traditionally been narrative, inconsistently formatted, overly focused on transactional elements, like numbers served, and when trying to make the case for actual change, unconvincing because the causal chain was not clear to readers.

We constructed our next grant applications after having done a little homework around this logic model. Our application created a clear logic chain from, “hire four coaches” all the way to “more kids will go to college.” We then cited evidence from our past outcomes and the fi eld to make the case for why this logic chain was likely to create positive change in the lives of our constituents well beyond participation in adaptive sports. Finally, we presented our logic chain in the visual format below, right on page one.

This concision and clarity of thought and presentation is a gift to a grant maker, who has to work through what feels like an endless and geometrically expanding stack of applications. Another potential advantage of using this logic model tool is that it underlies a large percentage of evaluation practices; it’s not impossible that your reader will recognize the framework from their own training.

We’ve used this, and more complex logic models around the world, in hundreds of engagements. It is among the simplest, most powerful tools we know. And it’s impossible to miss the actual point of this format, a standard of clarity and concision that many of your colleagues and competitors will fail to match. You may not get the grant, but you will have given it the best possible shot.