Tips for Restrictive Character Limits
Like most industries, grantmakers used to rely on paper grant applications submitted by mail or fax. Over the years, most funders – although not all – have transitioned from paper applications to online portals. These portals typically allow us to upload support materials with hyperlinks to more information, and it’s easier for us to share the grant preparation and submission process with the rest of our grant team. We also have more time to submit the application since we’re not worried about whether the due date is the postmark date or the receipt date… and then being 100% sure the postal service lost your package on the way to the funder (my longtime grant pros can relate).
But while the shift to online grant portals gave us more flexibility in preparing our grant applications and reports, they introduced a new challenge: character limits. Character limits restrict the number of characters in a given narrative response (some funders use word limits instead). Online portals are usually set up to automatically reject, delete, or flag text that exceeds the limit set by the funder, usually counting the characters of both words and spaces. Some portals are more forgiving than others.
Every grant professional has their own tricks to deal with character limits. I typically start my narrative writing by writing without limits in mind, then I whittle the response to within the funder’s limits using the character counter in Google Docs. In this post, I’m summarizing a few of my favorite methods to fit within character limits, and I’m also pointing out a few other considerations you might take into account as you’re dealing with these limitations.
Four tips for handling restrictive character limits
#1: Say goodbye to the Oxford comma
This is one of the easiest fixes you can make across your grant writing. Oxford commas are the comma that precedes “and” in a list of text. For example: “Children, young adults, and seniors from around the community participated in our program.” To shorten the response, I would remove the comma between young adults and seniors (“Children, young adults and seniors…”).
English majors, don’t come after me about this. I love a good Oxford comma! I use it in my own writing! You’ll see it used throughout this post! But when every Oxford comma takes up another valuable character in an already short narrative response, they’ve got to go. The only exception here is if the comma is needed for clarity.
Side bar: if you’re still using two spaces after every period… come on to this century!!
#2: Determine where you can say the same thing in fewer words
Particularly in impact statements, grant writing can be effusive. We want funders on board with the problem we’re solving, so we introduce flowery language to drive home the point. One of the first places I look when trying to shorten a narrative response is the adjectives. Maybe we’ve listed two to three adjectives where one to two would do the job.
Take for instance, this example ChatGPT gave me when I prompted it for a 1-2 sentence impact statement about a high school music education program:
"Through our dynamic and transformative music education program, high school students gained invaluable skills in creativity, collaboration and critical thinking, fostering both personal growth and academic success. The immersive experience has empowered students to build confidence, develop artistic expression, and cultivate a deep, lasting connection to the cultural vibrancy of their community."
This is fantastic! But it’s also just two sentences and over 400 characters (50+ words). How about whittling it under 300 characters?
"Through [name of the program], high school students gained invaluable skills in creativity, collaboration and critical thinking, fostering personal growth and academic success. Students have built confidence, developed artistic expression, and cultivated a lasting connection to the art form."
Use active voice instead of passive voice, and use empowering language. You’ll notice that ChatGPT suggested “The immersive experience has empowered students…” (47 characters), which I revised to “Students have built…” (19 characters). This slight change puts the students in charge of their own destiny.
And, here are a few examples of phrases you can shorten:
“In order to” becomes “to”
“Due to the fact that” becomes “because”
“In the event that” becomes “if”
“At this point” / “At this point in time” becomes “now”
#3: Use AI to help shorten your response
Speaking of ChatGPT: a popular use of large language models (LLM) among grant professionals is to use AI to shorten your narrative response to within a character limit. Let’s say your response is 3,500 characters, and you need to shave off 500 characters. Prompt your AI of choice with the question, your response, the required character limit, and the audience for whom you’re writing. This might take some back and forth so you don’t lose any critical information, and you’ll want to read the final response carefully for accuracy and clarity. Or you could even take it from the start and ask AI to write your initial response within the character limit (although I’ve had mixed results on AI actually following the character instructions).
#4: Write in a document, but refine your narrative in the funder’s portal
It’s so frustrating to work really hard within a Google Doc or a Word document to whittle down your narrative to under the funder’s limits only to find that their system counts characters differently.
One system I’ve worked in counts paragraph marks (the spaces between paragraphs) as characters while most ignore them. In this case, I use the portal’s application preview to see what the formatting looks like. If the funder’s system automatically inserts a space between paragraphs, I will remove the paragraph mark between paragraphs.
Another federal system makes up characters where it seems like they don’t even exist. It makes me pull my hair out every time. I recommend that you *always* paste without formatting from your document into a funder’s portal. (That’s command+shift+V on a Mac and control+shift+V on Windows.) This helps remove any non-printing characters that might carry over invisibly in the funder’s portal. You can also paste the text into a Text Editor app first, then copy that and paste it into the portal. I’ve even pasted it into Apple’s Spotlight feature (command+space) and copied from there and it often does the trick.
Regardless of how you do it, be cautious that the funder’s portal might truncate your response if it’s over the limit when you paste it. Always read back through your pasted response to be sure the entire narrative made it into the text box.
Other considerations for handling character limits
When funders give you an incredibly detailed prompt but an incredibly short character limit
Here’s an example prompt that only allowed 200 words:
Problem Statement: What is the social need or issue that your proposed project is trying to address? Please provide:
- Quantitative and/or qualitative data about the issue(s) you are trying to address, including region-specific or state-specific data, if available and applicable.
- The issue's urgency or timeliness.
- Sources for data cited, as available.
Example: Only 64 percent of rural students pursue postsecondary education compared to nearly 70 percent of their urban peers, resulting in lower lifetime earnings and reduced rural economic growth.
I mean, seriously?? It took you 82 words just to write the prompt!
If you have an issue like this, sometimes a funder will be open to revising the character limit in the application. This is especially true if the funder is using an online portal for the first time or if they’ve just released a new grant application. Without writing grants for a living, they may not realize how limiting 200 words will be in providing a complete response to this type of question.
When using inclusive language means using too many characters
One of the hardest narrative responses I had to write in the last year was a 500-character response to the following question:
Describe the historically underserved community or communities selected above. Be as specific and detailed as possible to demonstrate your organization's authentic understanding of these communities/populations.
Sure! I’ll be “specific and detailed” in essentially 75 words to communicate our “authentic understanding.” The craziest part to me is that most of the other responses in the application were at least 1,000 characters.
I’ve attended a number of training sessions in the last few years about using inclusive language, and most often, it means being specific about the population we’re talking about. Rather than BIPOC, do you really mean your city’s Spanish-speaking population? Rather than the umbrella term Native American, can you be specific about the tribe whose traditional lands your program occupies? Are you using identity-first language rather than people-first language? (“woman with a disability” rather than “disabled woman”)
Most of these cases will require you to use more characters to accurately and respectfully describe the population that your program serves. As above, if you find yourself running out of characters in a response where you’ve trimmed everything else possible, consider speaking with the funder about whether they would be willing to modify the character limit in the portal. In this case, it was a national, federally-funded grant opportunity, so we just had to do our best.
When it’s tempting to shorten the name of a program, partner, etc.
When I first started grant writing, I shortened *everything* to get below character counts. As I’ve progressed through my career (and served as a grant reviewer myself), I realized that using abbreviations can be confusing to readers. While I will still shorten some things within the application narrative (like the name of the program for which we’re applying), I do my best to leave full names in the narrative.
Conclusion
When you’re working in grant portals, it can be frustrating to come upon a very short character or word limit. This seems to happen the most when you’ve written the most beautiful narrative! Having the tricks above in your back pocket can help whittle down the narrative to within the funder’s requirements without removing critical information about your program.
What are your favorite tricks to shortening characters and words within narrative responses?
Cover photo by Andrey Popov on Canva