Needs Statements

 

Any proposal asking for money must:

• Tell "What it will do for the people"
• Address the grantor's expressed goals
• Link local needs data to the planned activity

A "needs statement" is usually the first section of a proposal narrative.

Needs must reflect the problems and challenges of the people that the grant is intended to serve (a.k.a., "target population").

You must show data-supported evidence of a local need  because you are usually going to spend the money locally. 

Grant Readers generally know about state and or national trends that are widely publicized in the literature, so you need to make the local connection for them.  Grant application readers are often instructed to score no points for citations of state and national studies and statistics unless they are persuasively connected to local data.