Broadening Employment Horizons: Transferring Proposal Writing Skills from For‐Profit to Nonprofit Organizations

When faced with the need to seek employment, technical communicators with expertise in proposal writing may want to extend their job‐seeking horizons to nonprofit organizations as potential employers. This chapter is based on the sad but persistent fact that plenty of cutbacks continue to be made in industry and that it is always a good idea to be flexible in the career path. Specifically, the chapter looks at the opportunities existing in nonprofit organizations such as colleges and universities for someone with corporate proposal‐writing experience. It makes a number of comparisons and contrasts between nonprofit and industrial proposals, such as their aims, reviews, and editing processes, and points out the different attitudes of corporate and nonprofit colleagues toward proposals. The chapter concludes with the reminder that there are several job titles besides "proposal writer" in the nonprofit sector that nevertheless describe positions involving a significant amount of proposal writing.