Tag: grant writing process

What Do Reviewers Look for in a Grant Application?

Despite increased efforts from foundations and funders to simplify the grant application process through FAQs, information sessions, and webinars, there still remains an air of mystery around reviewing grants.  So, what can you do to help your submission stand out?  Here are some items to consider before you submit your application.

Consider: Is your proposal realistic?  Have you thought the program through?  Is it a new program your organization is taking on, or are you doing the work already?  Will your program actually address the challenge?  Does your budget align with your project narrative? Lastly, are your outcomes possible, and can they realistically be evaluated?  Grant reviewers will be able to notice if you have padded the budget, or conversely, not allotted enough room in the budget to accomplish something.  Be honest, accurate, and direct about what you intend to do with the money if you receive it.

Read and follow the application guidelines.  Don’t start off on the wrong foot by incorrectly following submission guidelines or failing to answer the prompts accurately.  Make sure you are responding to exactly what is being asked of your application.  Re-read the questions and re-read your responses.  Then, do it again. Ask a colleague to read over your proposal to make sure you are following all direction.

Attend the informational webinar, phone call, or in-person session.  If your schedule allows, attend the information session related to the grant. This shows the funder that you are interested in the opportunity and dedicated to being as prepared as possible with your application.  While generally not a component in the scoring process, grantmakers will notice who participated in a listening session.

Before writing, take time to understand your audience.  As with all writing, it’s important to consider who you are writing for.  Do you know the history of the funder or this grant opportunity?  Have you researched previous awardees to see the types of programs funded?  Do you know how the funder reviews grants – a panel of staff reviewers grading your application or community volunteers?  Is your funder concerned with local or national initiatives?  Check the guidelines again for context clues to help you determine your audience and voice.

Provide Clear and Concise Responses.  Grant writing is a delicate balance of writing descriptively but also keeping it specific. Stay focused—you are writing to solve a problem, not convince the funder about your organization’s value. Reviewers want to know you are knowledgeable and prepared to do what you are proposing to do.  Telling a story can help illustrate you know the landscape and are ready to respond to it with your program.  Make sure to provide relevant details whenever possible and support your proposal with data or direct quotes.  In the end, is your response convincing?

It’s the job of a program officer or grant reviewer to steward their employer’s resources wisely.  It’s also their job to give funding to the organization that can convince them their program is the best way to address a challenge.  Help grant reviewers see you as knowledgeable, capable, and responsible, and success will follow.

Williams Grant Writing (WGW) has the team, time, skills, and systems in place to act as your grant writing partner. WGW can help you research funding opportunities, review draft applications, apply for the grant funding, and help you stay on top of reporting and deadlines. WGW has a proven track record of connecting nonprofits to funding. Contact us today to see how we can help!

 

Cultivating a Grantee-Funder Relationship

Establishing a direct connection and even an ongoing relationship with a funding organization is crucial for grant success. Relationship-building can take time, persistence, patience, and authenticity on your part. Like any relationship, balance your communication to not only gauge the funder’s interest in your impactful services, but also show how your interest in their funding priorities could lead to great partnerships together.

Establishing a direct connection with a funding organization is crucial for grant success. Here are 5 steps you can take to build a stronger relationship:

• Follow them on social media. This is possibly the simplest action you can take towards staying informed regarding a funder’s activities and letting a funder know you are interested.

• Add them to your mailing list. Consider adding the CEO and chief programs officer to your annual report mailing list. If the funders you are looking to deepen relationships with are local, send them invitations to events. The more times and different ways the funder becomes aware of who you are—the better.

• Play Six Degrees of Separation. Establish if anyone in your organization has connections with a funder. If someone from your board, staff, or constituents knows anyone who works at or is connected to the funder, find out if they get you an introduction or put in a good word?

• Letter of Introduction. If the funder is local, even regional, call and ask for an introduction meeting. Even if they do not accept unsolicited applications, send a letter with materials to introduce your organization. Explain how you connect with the foundation’s giving interests. Respect their boundaries, and do NOT ask for money. Instead, consider asking how the foundation selects who receives its grants.

• Do your research. Always research a foundation. Respect their process. Be confident that you are a good fit for them and vice versa. Be ready with talking points, and show you’ve spent time learning about them. Just like donor cultivation, make sure you are not always asking for something when communicating with a funder.

Funders prefer to speak to organizations directly. It provides an opportunity to establish an ongoing relationship, and – if the funder is open to it – it is a step towards developing trust, which will result in an increased likelihood of funding. Follow a funder’s contact instructions – always. If the grantmaker has not stated any preferences, it generally is safe to pursue a relationship with them.

Remember, relationship-building requires more than just persistent asking. Make sure to share your organization’s successes and show interest in their programs, too.

Williams Grant Writing (WGW) has the team, time, skills, and systems in place to act as your grant writing partner. WGW can help you research funding opportunities, review draft applications, apply for the grant funding, and help you stay on top of reporting and deadlines. WGW has a proven track record of connecting nonprofits to funding. Contact us today to see how we can help.

The Elephant in the Room: Grant Writing as Fundraising

There are many blogs, books, and conferences devoted to nonprofit fundraising. Topics, such as direct mail best practices, making “the ask,” and getting your board on-board, have been dissected again and again.  Yet, how honest are the conversations around fundraising coupled with grant writing?  Compared with the personal, relationship-based nature of appealing to individual donors and meeting face-to-face with local businesses for financial support, fundraisers can feel overwhelmed when also expected to research and write grants on top of their other responsibilities. When everything’s a trade-off, should your fundraiser spend their time grant writing? Or is their energy better spent cultivating relationships and stewarding donors? Here are a few considerations when debating the best use of your fundraising team’s time.

Grant writing is unique and requires a special skill set. Grant writing is vastly different from other types of fundraising and other types of writing.  The process is often solitary, reflective, and inward-focused. A strong grant application should be clear and concise, making sure to answer questions directly, with little-to-no niceties.  Simple, detail-driven, transactional grant writing is oftentimes in stark contrast to the friendly nature of a fundraiser who interacts with donors.

Grant writing is a process, with a system and deadlines. Maybe not the first or second time you apply for a grant, but once you’ve applied for enough grants, a good grant writer develops a system.  How is your system working for you?  Do you have a system? Large foundations have entire teams to monitor grant deadlines and reporting.  Smaller organizations with limited resources may find it difficult to systematize grant writing while balancing other fundraising activities.

When successful, the real work starts. When the grant is awarded, you and your organization must administer, track, and report on the grant funding.  There is typically more demanded on an organization when funding comes as a grant, so fundraisers must have the system in place to concentrate on the reporting.

Making the case for outsourcing your grant writing. Contracting your grant writing to an outside team frees staff to focus on what matters most: your mission and your donors.  Professional grant writers will write more objectively about your program and have the tracking systems in place to handle researching new grant opportunities and reporting once grants are obtained. What are you waiting for?

Williams Grant Writing (WGW) has the team, time, skills, and systems in place to act as your grant writing partner. WGW can help you research funding opportunities, review draft applications, apply for the grant funding, and help you stay on top of reporting and deadlines. WGW has a proven track record of connecting nonprofits to funding. Contact us today to see how we can help.

Staying Ready to Apply for that Dream Grant

If You Build It, They Will Come:
Staying Ready to Apply for that Dream Grant

Most of the time, working for a nonprofit means juggling competing deadlines, lack of resources and time constraints … all while fulfilling your important mission to do good work in your community. It can feel overwhelming to have inadequate planning time to get ahead and stay ahead of critical projects.

However difficult it may seem, planning is essential to success. So, schedule planning time on your calendar, turn off distractions and notifications for an hour or two, and compile your grant writing toolkit.

With a little prep work, you can get and stay ready for funding opportunities by organizing just a few commonly-asked-for grant application items. Because many funders are turning to online portals where you need to enter text into text boxes, it makes sense to organize your materials for easy copying and pasting of information. In Williams Grant Writing’s experience, there are six items most funders want to see to consider funding a program:

1. IRS 501(c)(3) Determination Letter
2. List of Board of Directors and Senior Management
3. List of 3-5 Highest Paid Employees and Salaries
4. Current Organizational Budget
5. Itemized Budget for Project
6. List of Other Funding Sources Associated with Project

Having these items ready-to-go will make those last-minute application deadlines easier to make.

Of course, compiling these 6 items is just the first step. WGW can help you research funding opportunities based on your programs and location, review draft applications, apply for the grant funding, and help you stay on top of reporting and deadlines. We have a proven track record of connecting nonprofits to funding. Contact us today to see how we can help!

Mastering the 4 Key Elements to the Grant Writing Process

If you’re not an expert grant writer, you have to learn to think like one.

In Outliers: The Story of Success, author Malcolm Gladwell wrote that “the key to achieving world-class expertise in any skill is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing the correct way, for a total of around 10,000 hours.”

Consider this 10,000-hour investment the next time you engage the services of an expert. Gladwell goes on to explain that one of the results of devoting that much time to expertise is that it is transformed into a habit. We often think of habits as bad traits, but it really means that you’re so capable of performing something that it requires little or no effort. You’re likely far from this point preparing grants. We’ve reached that. Here’s what we can tell you about the process.

It’s a discipline

Many of our clients ask how it’s possible to create—let alone streamline—a process for grant writing when every foundation and organization has a different set of requirements.

It does sound impossible.

Nevertheless, there are themes, patterns, and similarities that we’ve detected in our thousands of hours of experience in helping clients with grant writing. We’ve distilled them into these five steps.

1. Create a list of warm leads

Foundations don’t hide themselves. You can often find huge amounts of information from their own website and published grants databases. You’re looking for the history of grants they’ve awarded to validate that they match your own purpose.

Then, go in the opposite direction. Search for peer foundations. See if they’ve also awarded grants matching your purpose.

When all you do is write grants, you have instant access to sources and services that offer up-to-date information about funding opportunities. Our clients often tell us this service ranks as the most valuable thing we offer.

2. Verify data accuracy

Just because it’s published data doesn’t mean it’s correct. Your list of warm leads is only valuable if you’ve done everything you can to verify the information you’ve found. Imagine expending the effort to prepare a grant application, only to discover that it was based on inaccurate information.

Maybe the available data is outdated. Maybe a foundation has decided to change their focus or mandate. How do you go about verifying what you think you know? You have to reach out to the foundations and cultivate relationships with them. We often see that when a client takes the time to connect with a funder, the rest of the process goes so much more smoothly.

We can’t say it enough: this is a critical step for nonprofits. Developing a relationship with a funder – even if that’s just a call or two – means you can be confident you’re a good match for them, shows your interest in their organization, and lets you cull your lead list down to the best potential matches, saving you time and effort in the long run.

3. Review, review, review!

We’ve already touched upon something you probably have already experienced firsthand. Each foundation has a unique submission process. The next step after you’ve selected your leads and verified their potential is—to stop.

Don’t proceed until you have reviewed the submission process and application information and are confident that:

  • You should pursue the opportunity
  • You are fully qualified

Immersing yourself in the application’s details can uncover things that might stop the process dead in its tracks. Do you have the specific requirements outlined in the application? Then it’s time to proceed.

These aren’t obstacles to prevent you from working with a foundation. They’re challenges to ensure that you truly are a right fit for funding. Otherwise, you’ll waste time and money.

4. Tell your story

It’s time to write the proposal. If you’re unfamiliar with what a grant writer does, you may think this is our biggest area of contribution. The proposal is a culmination of our work—there’s no argument about that. It’s based, however, on the effort that goes in to the previous 3 steps.

All this preparatory work allows us to craft an accurate, clear, and compelling proposal. Our structural procedures have been created and honed based on hundreds and hundreds of grant proposals.

The story the material tells is at the proposal’s heart, but the attachments and support materials must also be technically correct. Foundations aren’t heartless, but they are professional. They expect you to be able to adhere to their requests.

5. Following up

We’ll be honest: you may find this is the most unnerving part of the process. We often refer to it as “the waiting game,” but it’s anything but a game. In most cases, there’s nothing to be done but wait for the foundation’s response.

We’ve found from experience that there are times when it’s appropriate to check in with a foundation on the status of an application. Generally, however, it’s not a good idea. How will you know? Because you’ll have taken the time to develop a relationship with the funder and understand not just what they’re looking for in an application, but in the post-submission phase as well.

We often counsel our clients not to spend much time worrying over the inevitable wait. Fueling your organization with funding is an ongoing effort. You’ll have moved on to the next application project, and started your research, relationship-building, and writing all over again.

Will you ever reach the point where you have 10,000 hours of grant writing experience under your belt? Maybe a better question to ask yourself is whether you should make that a goal. You could be much closer to achieving the “world-class expertise” Malcolm Gladwell talks about if you instead focus on leading your organization.

Experts know the benefits of working with other experts. Grant writing is all we do. Maybe it’s time our paths crossed. Contact us today and put us to work for you.