Author: Andrew Grant

While most grant maker guidelines — foundation, corporate and certainly government — specifically exclude capital campaigns, there are some few that will consider a proposal requesting campaign support.

Applicants need to identify those in their funding source research. The proposal will be a restatement of the case statement and should be formatted according to the funder’s guidelines.

Before applying for grant funding, it is wise to have completed the silent phase and include fundraising progress in the proposal. Grant funders to campaigns generally don’t like to be first and they don’t like to be the largest contributor. Showing them that lead gifts are in hand and that the campaign has generated at least 50% of goal is an important strategy consideration when including grants in a campaign portfolio.

What about all those grantors that exclude campaign funding? Many campaigns today are not just for “bricks and mortar.” They are structured to include programmatic themes. These may include scholarships, endowment support, special projects of many types, as well as general support — and also buildings.

In applying for support to funders that exclude campaigns, the proposal writer should focus on the specific components contained in the overall campaign, and structure the request for the specific project or projects. As long as the proposal is consistent with the grant makers’ guidelines, it may be considered even though the program is part of a larger campaign.

As always, the applicant should try to make personal contact with the funder to discuss the project. It’s fine to mention the overall campaign in that conversation, and that reference can be echoed in the proposal.

Will grants “count” toward the campaign goal if the funder is not making a grant to the campaign itself, but is supporting a project within the campaign?
A review of the CASE* Standards will provide guidance. Most grants can be considered if the campaign is of the “count everything” variety. Even some government grants may qualify — especially if they are NEH type challenge grants. Gifts made in response to the challenge, and the NEH payments will count.

* (Council for the Advancement and Support of Education)

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Have a comment or a question about starting or expanding your grants program? Email me at Andrew@GrantServices.com..

Back in the early days of my career – when high tech meant you had a fax machine – one of my proposals to the National Endowment for the Humanities for an elementary school enrichment project was rejected, and we wanted to find out if it made sense to reapply.

I traveled from New York to Washington to meet with our program officer. He said we lost it on the evaluation, noting that our pre-test/post-test model required too much testing. So I asked him what he considered a good evaluation design.

His response was that if the children looked like they were having a good time; it would be considered a good program. We rewrote it following that advice, and it was funded and renewed several times.

That would never happen today. Funders have become consumed with the notion of outcomes assessment. Proposals must be clear about what will be accomplished with the money granted by the funder. They must clearly distinguish between goals and objectives. Goals are a general statement of intent. In the example I gave, providing an enrichment experience to a group of fourth graders would be a goal. But the outcomes need to be much more targeted.

They must detail the exact result the program will achieve for a specified number of participants, within a limited period of time. The objectives also need to presage the mechanism through which the program will be evaluated.

So the objective in our example might be “As a result of this program, 50 fourth-grade students will increase their understanding of local history by being able to attain a grade of 80% on the XYZ Standardized test of historical understanding.” That’s a long way from our program officer’s response. By the way, that’s how we wrote the proposal the first time, but it was more than 30 years ago.

Success in getting funded depends very much on knowing exactly what the grant project will accomplish. That should be one of the first questions one asks oneself. “What will be different as a result of this program?”

Funders not only want their grants to make a difference; they want to know exactly what that difference will be.

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Have a comment or a question about starting or expanding your grants program? Email me at Andrew@GrantServices.com..

(Writing a “Wow” Needs Statement)

So, how do you capture and hold the attention of the funder reading your proposal?

The first section of each proposal, after an introduction or executive summary, is the Needs Statement. That is where the proposal writer presents and justifies the request for funding.

The funder, of course, will be interested only if the applicant’s research had determined, and can demonstrate, that the project being presented is central to the funder’s agenda. Assuming that to be the case, the Needs Statement is the foundation upon which the entire proposal rests.

The need can be conceptualized as the gap between a situation as it exists and some ideal state.

For example, an animal rights group documents the abuse of animals and proposes a project of public education to reduce such abuse by a projected percentage. The need always must be presented from the point of view of the population to be assisted (animals, in this case).

Inexperienced proposal writers often, mistakenly, substitute the needs of the applicant organization for the needs of those being served.

Strong proposals offer compelling solutions to be carried out by competent, solvent applicants. Funders will not be moved by “needs” that talk about how much the applicant’s endowment has shrunk. [That gets us back to the “readiness” issue of an earlier blog. (See: Grant Readiness)] Only organizations that can present strong credentials will be in a position to address the needs they document.

The Need Statement must be well structured and supported by research to make the case. The need should elicit a, “Wow! I never realized that!” response.

Depending on the subject, citations and data can be used as long as they don’t disrupt the narrative flow. Go back to the newspaper article to see how a skilled reporter builds a case and draws in the reader. Then apply that structure to your proposal need and compare it to the ample number of examples available on the web.

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Watch for future (Grants) blogs in this series discussing the other elements of a grant proposal.
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Have a comment or a question about starting or expanding your grants program? Email me at Andrew@GrantServices.com..

So, you’ve completed your research and are ready to start writing!! The question, now, is how do you go about structuring your grant proposal?

For those circumstances where the funder provides specific guidelines, there’s only one rule worth remembering: “Follow those guidelines to-the-letter.”

But what about those many occasions when there are no guidelines for preparing the proposal? There are many examples on the web — just search for grant proposals, and hundreds, if not thousands, of hits will result.

Grant consultant web sites offer free information on formatting a proposal. My favorite is the Foundation Center’s Proposal Short Course at, http://fdncenter.org.

One of the best ways of learning how to structure a grant proposal, however, is by reading any lead article on the front page of the New York Times … or other daily newspaper. Grant proposals follow the journalistic model of who, what, when and how.

I once taught a proposal writing workshop for junior development professionals who were in their positions for less than six months. Their class assignment was to start writing so we, the faculty, could offer a critique. One participant turned in a near perfect first draft. When we questioned her as to why she was attending the class, she said she’d only been a development writer for three months. So we asked what she had done before? She had been a reporter !!

Structuring a proposal requires clear, concise writing. As in a NY Times article, the proposal writer needs to engage the reader by presenting a compelling case outline in the first paragraph or two. That introduction should include a statement of the issue to be addressed, why the applicant has the capacity to address it, how it will be addressed, who will be affected and how much it will cost.

The rest of the proposal then expands on each of those elements. Like the newspaper article, the lead tells all there is to tell and then entices the reader to learn more.
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Watch for future (Grants) blogs in this series, discussing each of those elements. Part Two, next Tuesday.
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Have a comment or a question about starting or expanding your grants program? Email me at Andrew@GrantServices.com..

The grant making process is highly subjective. The vast majority of private foundations are family foundations that show up in the research resources, but that select their grantees on the basis of personal preferences. Most do not even accept proposals. Their grants are akin to individual donations, and the fact that they are grants at all is merely a function of the IRS Code. It simply is more advantageous to the donor to create a foundation than to make gifts directly.

Even government agencies are prone to subjectivity. While funding guidelines are statutory, specific priorities often are determined by what’s currently hot in the area covered by the grant program. In some scientific disciplines, only a handful of individuals across the country may be qualified to evaluate grant proposals in their discipline, and it’s typical that they know each other’s work.

What does this mean for the grant seeker? Once a non-profit agency has decided to devote resources to grant seeking, its staff needs to follow a realistic approach. That includes following the steps outlined in (Part 1 of Grant Seeking By The Book) my previous posting, but they must be tempered with a focus on forming relationships with the funders, and not merely submitting proposals identified by their research.

Networking is one of the most important items in the grant seeker’s resource kit. Every effort should be made to establish a personal relationship with the funder. That includes making contact with government program officers and seeking out foundation trustees, especially those located in the applicant’s community.

Many times it’s not possible to do that, but submitting a cold proposal without prior discussion should be considered a last resort resulting from a strategic decision to incur that opportunity cost.

In grant seeking, as in most things, success leads to additional success. Often, the best resources can be found among the funders who have already made grants to an organization. The professional grant seeker should not be bashful in networking among his/her current grantors to open new opportunities. They need to make the subjectivity of the grants process work for them, not against them.

We’re taking a break, not blogging over the long July 4 weekend. Be back on July 6 with Part 2 of “Another Reason Why I Object to Feasibility Studies.”

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Have a question about starting or expanding your grants program? Email me at Andrew@GrantServices.com..

I have been a grants professional since 1974 — that’s a long time. I have worked in agencies that range from the largest single local public agency in the country to a tiny seminary … and everything in between.

During that time I’ve taught countless grant seekers in graduate and continuing education courses, and in professional workshops. In those early days of teaching, I structured my courses around the three basic principles of seeking grant funding — program design, funder research and proposal writing.

The process started with a well-structured, compelling program or mission statement for organizations seeking targeted core support. Then the grant seeker needed to conduct a comprehensive search of grant makers and their priorities.

Today that’s all done electronically, but in years past it required endless hours search through printed directories. That research yielded a list of potential funders that then had to be filtered further — for a variety of factors that “qualified” them appropriate prospects to be sent an application.

Those factors included geography, applicant eligibility, funding range and program compatibility. The final list included only those funders whose priorities matched those of the applicant. Next, the applicant wrote proposals that were consistent with the funder’s guidelines, submitted those applications, and then waited.

That was, and still is the standard curriculum for courses on grantsmanship, whether one-day workshops or semester long seminars.

This structured, sequential approach is, in fact, the process that grant seekers must follow, but it is a process that hardly guarantees success.

Eventually I came to recognize that we well-meaning professionals were doing a disservice to grant seekers by presenting this cookbook approach as the road to getting funded. As I wrote in an earlier blog, grants represent the greatest effort for the least return of any fundraising strategy. Only 5% to 10% of grant application are funded in any cycle.

Want to increase your odds ?? Watch for Part 2 … next Tuesday, June 29 !!

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Have a question about starting or expanding your grants program? Email me at Andrew@GrantServices.com..

Grants represent the most effort for the least predictable return.

The question, therefore, is to first determine what resources will be needed before an organization contemplates launching a grants program!!

Researching grant sources, planning projects, preparing proposals and budgets and managing funded programs all require a lot someone’s time/labor – all of those comprise the “opportunity costs.” What, then, will the nonprofit organization have to give up to work on preparing grant proposals?

As Hank suggested in his June 1 posting, cultivating major donors is (should be) a high priority for most organizations. Most fundraisers can judge how likely it is that their efforts will result in a gift, and they move ahead in their pursuit of potential donors based on that judgment.

Annual fund experience generally is predictable, and the organization can assess the return on its investment. Similarly, special events (especially those created by Natalie) yield results that can be consistent from year to year.

On an annual basis, only about 5% – 10% of grant applications are funded. That’s not very impressive, and a good reason why organizations need to assess the benefits they will realize from pursuing grants.

But, before they do that, they should have predictable, consistent sources of hard money income. That is, those sources of funds they can rely on from year to year.
If they are at a stage in their development where they honestly can say they can rely on their normal income sources and, if they can envision special initiatives that are beyond the scope of their operating revenues, they can consider if a grant program is warranted.

If it is, they need to devote resources to funder identification, proposal writing and grants management. Such infrastructure is necessary for the pursuit of grants. If these resources incur unacceptably high opportunity costs, the organization is not ready to engage in a grants program. Their efforts are better directed to more productive sources of funding.
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Have a question about starting or expanding your grants program? Email me at Andrew@GrantServices.com..

That’s an important distinction. The defining characteristic of a gift is that control over its use passes to the recipient the minute the transfer is made. While some donors may restrict a gift to a general purpose — scholarships for example — decisions over the deployment of the funds within that restriction rest entirely with the recipient.

Furthermore, the donor receives nothing in return, as is clearly stated in standard gift receipts.

The opposite is true with grants. A grant is an exchange transaction in which each party receives a “benefit.” The grantor maintains an element of control throughout the life of the grant, and sometimes thereafter.
The terms of the grant are spelled out in a grant agreement or contract that is signed by both parties, and the grantee is obligated to fulfill those terms or risk forfeiting the funds.

The terms typically include performance of the project procedures described in the grant proposal, accomplishment of enumerated outcomes, reporting on a specified schedule and adherence to accepted accounting standards … including maintenance of separate accounts for the grant funds.

What does the grantor get in return? While not a tangible benefit, the grantor’s agenda is promoted. To be successful in obtaining a grant, an applicant must address the funder’s agenda, and create a partnership in which the grantee conducts programs or projects that are mutually beneficial.

Government grants especially fit this model, although it is also true of many large foundations. Government grants essentially are elements of policy control – the government agency promotes its policy initiatives by using funds to enable the grantee to conduct programs consistent with that agenda.

In the case of corporate grants, the expectation is that the company does get some tangible return – if nothing more than good will in the community; but, more on that in a future blog on corporate funding.

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Have a question about starting or expanding your grants program? Email me at Andrew@GrantServices.com..