Proposal Writer

Established in 2015, the Awards Management Unit (AMU) is a global unit spanning New York, Washington DC, London, Berlin, Bonn, Geneva, Nairobi and Amman. It has responsibility for identifying, securing and managing all funding from statutory donors, and was designed as an end-to-end business process owner and support structure for IRC’s grant lifecycle. The Unit is organized into five teams, called ‘pillars’: Strategic Partnerships & Analytics; Program & Grants Support; Compliance & Policy; Business/Program Development; and Training & Curriculum Development.

The Global AMU is a bridge between donors and country programs: providing expert technical advice to country programs, while maintaining portfolio-level visibility to ensure consistency and compliance, and manage risk. This unit ensures that donor compliance policies and procedures are implemented consistently, and supports all staff working across the grants management cycle for all restricted funding from global government sources. The unit operates within a matrix management system across the teams in the US, Germany, the UK and based in our global programs, driving functional integration between all relevant units and staff.

The Purpose of the Role

IRC is seeking a full-time Proposal Writer to write and support competitive opportunities.The position sits in the business development team and will be responsible for producing cohesive technical proposals.S/he will gather inputs from proposal managers, country offices and technical experts and reviewers to clearly articulate the win strategy in the proposal response. The Proposal Writer will bring strong knowledge of international development and a technical area relevant to IRC’s work.The ideal candidate will have a successful track record of writing large-scale and complex proposals in international development with particular emphasis on US Government (USAID, CDC, and MCC) and/or FCDO and European donors.

RESPONSIBILITIES

•Lead the process for writing technical proposals, working closely with the proposal manager to gather inputs from technical and country teams and partners, preparing drafts and incorporating comments from reviews

•Develop requirement-drive outlines (or storyboards) and write and edit concept notes and proposals, ensuring responsiveness to requirements in the solicitation

•Consolidates technical inputs into a cohesive proposal draft, ensuring that the technical approach is clear, responsive to donor requirements, and incorporates win themes

•Participate in design sessions to understand the technical approach and ensure donor requirements are responded to

•Research and synthesize background documents, including program materials, donor/government strategies and partner materials

•Maintains IRC’s library of boilerplate materials, including institutional capability statements, past performance examples, project-specific textboxes, management sections etc

•Use evidence and learning from across the organization to strengthen proposals

•Collaborate with IRC’s pricing team and proposal manager, ensuring technical vs. budget consistency

•Build capacity of teams to write responsive, compliant and compelling concept notes/proposals

•Contribute to, and model the use of standardized business development processes, tools, templates and information.

Skills, Knowledge and Qualifications:

•Bachelor’s degree in relevant field, including international relations, political science, public administration, and communications.

•4+ years experience with a successful track record leading the writing on complex subject, multi-year, multi-partner proposals with minimal supervision.

•Excellent English language written and oral communication skills, including the ability to effectively present complex ideas to a diverse audience

•Experience working with US Government and/or FCDO and other European donors.

•Technical expertise in one of IRC’s core technical areas (Health, Education, Economic Growth and Development, Governance, Violence Protection)

•Familiarity with Theory of Change and Logical Framework approaches

•Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, including the ability to effectively manage a variety of relationships in a multicultural environment;

•The ability to work productively and accurately while under pressure in a fast-paced, demanding environment;

•Flexible work attitude: the ability to work both in a team environment and independently and ability to meet unexpected demands and shifting priorities;

•Ability to multi-task and prioritize effectively;

•Familiarity with best practice tools to plan, organize and review proposals desirable

•Ability to travel internationally (up to 20% of time);

•Fluency in English with proficiency in one other language (French or Spanish) desirable.