Grant Writing For Dummies. Beverly A. Browning

      

Involve both your board of directors and your administrative staff in fleshing out the funding plan and updating it. Sit down and have a brainstorming session to determine your funding priorities. Ask administrative staff about unmet needs, waiting lists, or any feedback from frontline employees. Ask board members to assess programmatic weaknesses from their viewpoint as well. When the Status/Results column changes, update it immediately and get a copy of the modified plan document out to all who need it as their roadmap for assignments.

      

Keep your funding plan flexible. Funders change their priorities often, and your target population’s needs are likely to change as well. So be willing to review previous evaluation reports or results from funded programs and stay on top of newly released community needs assessments. Update the funding plan by removing and adding programs and services, and then incorporate these changes into your revised document.

Increasing Your Chances for Grantseeking Success

      When you’re ready to start your grantfunding research, keep your funding plan template close at hand. You’re likely to find a lot of potential funding opportunities, so reading the opportunity and then perusing the plan to make sure the opportunity fits is a smart move. You’re searching for perfect fits between what you need and what the funder wants to fund.

      

The best way to sustain a high funding success rate is to identify multiple funding sources for each project initiative in your funding plan. Then submit your grant proposals to all of them.

      

Sending out multiple proposals is standard practice as long as you tell all the funders that you plan to approach other sources. Providing each proposal with a simple one-page attachment labeled “Funding Sources Receiving This Request” is the most ethical way to inform all funders of your strategy. (I provide an example of such a document in Chapter 19.) Or you can list other sources you’ve approached on the actual grant application, if such a section exists.

      In the sections that follow, I explain what you need to know to find a broad range of potential funding sources.

      Looking for needles in a haystack

      To identify as many potential grantfunding sources as possible for your organization, you need to carefully research the primary sources of funding: the public sector (federal, state, and local government) and the private sector (foundations and corporations).

      As you read information on each funder, you see few, if any, funders want to receive a grant proposal without any warning from the applicant. For many, you need to, in a sense, be invited to submit a full grant request after you’ve met each funder’s initial contact requirements. That’s why your initial approach (your first contact with the funder) is so important.

      Review each funder’s initial approach preference using their website or funding database subscription to find what initial contact or approach document they require. In Chapter 6, I tell you how to find private-sector funders and mine the right information. You can find more information regarding these documents in the later section “Using a letter of inquiry or intent to comply with pre-application guidelines.”

Focus on finding open or current grantfunding opportunities first. Then you can print out expired notices and contact the grantmaking agency to see whether the funding will be available again in the future.

Create a day-to-day work plan to monitor a project that will require multiple funding requests. When you’re juggling multiple funders, developing a work plan using a table or spreadsheet format and plotting this information, as I show in Figure 2-2, is a good way to stay organized and on top of everything. Your work plan is an extension of all the details plotted out in your funding plan. The work plan is an ancillary document to track all potential funders for one program. Make sure the funder number listed on your table matches up with the correct grant proposal. Also, as you move through the application process, fill in the last two columns on the right-hand side. In the status column, you can enter: writing scheduled, writing in progress, submitted, and pending decision. For the outcome column, you can fill in funded or rejected when you know.

      Illustration by Ryan Sneed

      FIGURE 2-2: Make a chart to track multiple potential funders for one program.

      Conducting a federal funding search

      Thankfully, the federal government aids your federal funding search with its one-stop grant opportunity information website, Grants.gov (www.grants.gov). Visiting this site is the quickest way to conduct a federal funding search.

      After you log on to Grants.gov, choose Grant Opportunities from the Search drop-down. Then type your search terms in the Keyword(s) Search field. Sample keywords include “after school,” “capacity building,” “rural telecommunications,” and “prevention.” Your search should produce a list of federal grant opportunity announcements that contain your keyword(s). Simply click each one to read the announcement and determine whether it fits your specific funding needs.

      

You may want to search Grants.gov on a weekly or monthly basis because the federal government releases new grant opportunity announcements daily (except for federal holidays). Or simply sign up for Grants.gov alerts under Manage Subscriptions (in the upper-right corner of the homepage) to get free alerts by email.

      Performing a foundation or corporate funding search

      When you’re ready to conduct a foundation or corporate funding search, the place to turn to is Candid (https://candid.org/). This center's resources and online grant-research database (Foundation Directory Online by Candid) provide grantseekers, grantmakers, researchers, policymakers, the media, and the general public with up-to-date information on grant funding and other nonprofit-related issues.

      Through the Foundation Directory Online by Candid, you can download profiles of foundations whose interests, priorities, and types of funding support match your funding needs. These profiles include the foundation’s address, website, contact person, funding priorities, award range, preferred method of initial approach, and much more. To conduct your search, you can either subscribe to the directory (varying levels of subscriptions are available, beginning at as little as $31.58 per month for a locked-in, two-year contract) or use Candid’s website to locate a Funding Information Network (FIN) near you that has a subscription to the directory.

When you start using the Candid’s resources, you see several information fields for entering your keywords. Keep it simple. If you’re looking