The second draft and exporting

A grant application isn’t a stack of separate answers — reviewers read it as one document. The second draft is a whole-application pass that makes your answers read that way.

Where the controls live

Everything that moves an application forward sits in the bar at the top of the Application Workspace, and it stays there as you scroll. The bar shows three things, left to right:

• Which stage you’re in — Setup, First draft, Review answers, Second draft, Final review.
• How far along you are — a progress bar and a count of the answers you’ve marked Complete.
• The one thing to do next, as a single button. When there’s more than one reasonable move, the others sit quietly beside it.

You don’t need to hunt at the bottom of the page for a row of buttons. There isn’t one.

What the second draft does

Click Generate Second Draft. PowerGrant re-reads every answer as a single document and rewrites them to work together:

• Removes repetition. The same statistic won’t be re-explained in three answers — it’s stated once and acknowledged after that.
• Keeps names consistent. Organization names are written out on first reference and kept consistent after that, following any naming rules in the funder’s guidelines.
• Enforces length limits. Answers with a stated word or character limit are trimmed to fit.
• Respects your words. Sections you marked as a Unique Answer are treated as authoritative and left alone.
• Follows your house style. Any Writing Guidance your organization has set applies to this pass too. When it is set, a Writing Guidance applied note sits next to the Generate Second Draft button.

Each section shows its progress while the second draft runs, and your formatting — bold, lists, paragraphs — is preserved. As with everything in PowerGrant, version history keeps your previous text one click away.

Because the rewrite is a fresh pass over every answer, running it clears the Complete marks so you re-read what changed. That’s the point: the second draft is new text, and it deserves the same look the first one got.

When to run it

Run the second draft once your answers are in good shape individually — after you’ve refined the sections you care most about. It’s the “read it top to bottom” pass a good editor does before submission.

You don’t have to mark every answer Complete first. Marking answers is a way to keep track of what you’ve already been through on a long application, not a gate — if two answers are still unmarked, the bar will say so and the button will still work. Run it whenever you’re ready.

Export your application

Click the download icon in the top bar, on the right next to Close:

• Word (.docx) — formatted and ready to paste into a funder’s portal or send for board review. Your numbered lists, bullets, and bolding carry over, and the document uses Arial throughout.
• Plain text — for portals that reject rich formatting. Lists keep their numbers, bullets, and indentation as plain characters.

Your draft also stays saved in PowerGrant, so the version you submitted is always there to build on — next year’s renewal starts from this year’s win.