Tag: write a grant proposal

Where to Research Grant Opportunities

Moving through the maze of grant opportunities can be a daunting challenge. There are so many organizations, with varying criteria, and new opportunities pop up all the time. Anyone who has worked on grants knows it can take as much time to research eligible grant applications as it can take to apply for them. It’s important to keep an eye on new opportunities as the reward can be well worth the search. Here are some tips to help you find the right grants for your organization.

Think Local… Like, really local.
Start with your board. Many organizations neglect to tap into the networks of their boards. Your board members are probably some of the people most connected and loyal to your organization, who volunteer their time, talent, and treasure. They want to be helpful. Many board volunteers sit on other boards and committees. When is the last time you asked if they knew of any opportunities?

United Way and other community funders. Most people think of the United Way and similar organizations as only conduits for workplace giving. However, many of these community fundraising organizations have open grant cycles bi- or semi-annually. These nonprofits can also spearhead efforts to organize volunteer time or in-kind support that can benefit your organization.

Kiwanis Clubs, Rotary Clubs, and other community membership groups. These local affiliation groups, and ones like them, are made of community members dedicated to making the world a better place. Many of the older, more established clubs have foundations, restricted to funding initiatives in the communities in which they were established.

Look to your Peers. Yes, we all do it! Look at websites, annual reports, and social media to see which foundations have given to your peers. And even though it might seem counter-intuitive, meet with other fundraisers and grant writers to see if they have any ideas. Most funders do not give multiple years in a row to the same applicant. Many times your peers are more than willing to share their success with you.

Local Nonprofit Affinity Groups. Local membership and professional development groups such as the Association of Fundraising Professionals, nonprofit education centers, and others, will boost grant opportunities from time to time. Membership sometimes required.

Regional, county, and statewide.
Community Foundations. Whether city, county, state or regional, community foundations are comprised of charitable giving funds established by generous donors. The community foundations collect fees and draw from their endowment to create pools of available-to-spend grant dollars. Most have open grant cycles 2 or 4 times a year.

Corporative Giving. Who are the largest corporate employers in your region? Many businesses who have made their money in your community have foundations or giving programs to give back to the community. Check their websites for foundation information, and if so, check their 990s for previous grant history. Don’t see any mention? Try to find their marketing/public relations contact and inquire.

Think digitally… the future is here to stay.
The internet has given us so many tools to make our lives easier. There are many industry tools to research opportunities, though all have an associated membership cost. Two of WGW’s favorites are Foundation Directory Online and GrantScape.

Foundation Directory Online. Who remembers when the Foundation Directory was a book? Now the resource is online, with information on thousands of funders, including corporate foundations and U.S. federal agencies, updated weekly. Filters and search tools give you access to grant histories which means you can spend a lifetime seeing the types and amounts of grants awarded, all with a few clicks!

GrantScape. According to its website, GrantScape is the largest and broadest grants opportunities database available. In addition to its search functions, GrantScape also has workspace functions that can help you manage, track, and analyze your opportunities, as well as set up alerts for new grants opportunities.

Don’t get overwhelmed by the possibilities! 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!

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!

 

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!

Grant Writing: What Makes Your Proposal Stand Out From the Crowd

Your application will have multiple parts, but will each one tell the same story?

“Oh, I could never do that,” they say. The thing they could never do is to ask for money. If you press them for a reason, it invariably leads to self-perception. Those who say they could never ask for money don’t want to be thought of as disadvantaged or responsible for why they should ask for money.

Few grant writers find themselves in this category. Often, what sets apart a successful grant writer from those who struggle is their attitude toward asking. You’ll notice a selective use of verbs and adjectives in their proposals. This helps them correctly position their organizations in the minds of funders. It’s about psychology and positioning, and there are 4 writing tips you can use along the way.

1. For goodness sakes, do your homework!

Take a moment and roll your eyes in disbelief. Get it out of your system. Does it really need to be said? The answer is a resounding yes. There’s the need to be assured that the grantor’s interest and funding philosophies align.

It’s only the beginning. Go past the all the items on the checklist you’ve made. Give yourself time to wander and do some associating. This foundation is more than a funding source. It’s an organization that can have extremely useful connections. You won’t know this until you research and look for patterns to jump out at you.

2. Present a logical solution

While it’s true that foundations and funders are on the lookout for innovators, your solution still must be processed and validated for funding. For that, it must be in the form of a story that has a beginning, where you’ll present the problem. Then you’ll move on to present your solution. The third part is a projection of your outcomes.

It’s a 3-part story. Don’t generate any sub-parts, and don’t change the order.

The problem/solution/results formula prevents grantors from getting lost as they read through your proposal. The steps are logical. It allows you to be in control of the story being told with the proposal’s narrative.

  • Here’s the problem
  • Here’s what we’re going to do
  • Here’s what will happen when we apply the solution

3. Convince the grantmaker you know what you’re doing

This is not about competence. Due diligence will decide whether your organization has succeeded in the past and can implement the program outlined in your grant application.

This is about connectivity. Funders and foundations want to know you understand the community you serve. They’re looking for reasons to support your solution. Those reasons aren’t a list of “because” statements. It’s a story of insight that’s expressed with statistics, followed with interpretations and conclusions.

Grantors are looking for more than fundable ideas. They also want reassurance that your organization will be a capable fiduciary steward of their grant. In most cases, that’s historical proof. Your application will call out the skills and experience of your organization’s leaders.

4. Stick to the story

Many people look at grant applications as having two parts. There’s the narrative, and there’s the budget. The narrative is where you craft a compelling story about how you will create social change with the funding from the grant.

Awesome! And do those spreadsheets in the budget area tell that same story?

Grant applications get rejected when the story of your numbers is different than the story of your narrative. A grantmaker reviewing your application should be able to look at the budget alone and decide if it’s worth supporting. It should need no help from your narrative. It should be a part of your narrative.

5. Remember who you’re writing for

It’s not always appropriate or advisable, but sometimes when you have a question there is no better way to continue than to pick up the phone and have a person-to-person conversation with a foundation representative. Why guess what they want to see to decide? When you take the time to build a relationship with a funder, you can be confident that your application focuses on what’s important to them, not just what’s important to you. And that’s a great way to stand out.

If you need help getting your proposals noticed, put us to work for you. Grant writing is all we do. Contact us today.