Tips for Successful Grant Writing

With everyone pinching every penny at least twice these days, many nonprofits are relying more and more on volunteers and unpaid interns. When you are using a substantial amount of unpaid labor, your program budget will not reflect the true cost of operating your nonprofit. You can and should include an amount for volunteer time in your grant budget. The same amount will appear in your income section showing the donation for time as what you put in the expense line. (You can see an example in my article on grant budgets.)

Finding the right dollar amount is important – you don’t want to over- or undervalue the volunteer and intern time. Ruth Wahtera has written a lot on this topic in her grant writing blog. Rest assured that including volunteer time is standard practice. For example, the Federal EPA includes instructions for this in its tips on grant budgets (mid-way down the long page).

No one will want to pay you (at least, not much) to write your first grant. So how do you get started earning money from grant writing? You will need samples of your grant writing to show potential clients and references from satisfied clients. Volunteering to help a small community group raise money with a couple of grants is a great way to get samples and references.

Then you have to determine how much to charge. Professional grant writers do not work on commission but for a fixed fee or for an hourly rate. A very simple grant prepared by a new grant writer might cost $250, but a complicated government application prepared by an experienced grant writer could earn several thousand dollars. There are a lot of factors that determine price. You can read more about pricing and building a resume and portfolio on my web site, grantadviser.com/freelance.html.

Frequently people are looking for grants to start what will hopefully be for-profit businesses. “Where to go for funding and will a grant writing book be of use to them,” they ask.

On the federal and state levels, the Small Business Administration makes many loans to start up businesses. Government agencies on the local level may offer grants to start ups or to save businesses having trouble or to get them to locate in specific areas, frequently called Economic Empowerment Zones or Business Improvement Districts. Some quick research and/or calls to the offices of your elected representatives should reveal several sources.

And writing those grants will not differ from writing a foundation grant as described in the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Grant Writing. In fact, one college was using my book as one of two required texts in a class on entrepreneurship.

For many people, there is nothing more frightening than staring down a blank page. Yet this is often the best place to start. Time and again, I have seen grant writers held back in their creativity because they take as their starting point the last proposal written for a project. Doing that perpetuates mediocrity and never results in a fresh, inspiring proposal.

Each proposal you write should address not only the organization but the specific person who will read your proposal, which is why you need a fresh start. If the person who will read your proposal is familiar with your program, don’t start out with a detailed description of how the program works — they already know that. Tell them first about all of the good that has been done as a result of their grant. If recognition is important to the organization, be sure to stress that near the beginning of the proposal.

If the sight of a blank page is holding you back, the The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Grant Writing, 2nd Edition CD included with my book provides a Narrative Builder tool. It asks you to answer a series of questions. The Narrative Builder saves your answers and, when you have completed them, assembles them into a logical sequence, which serves as the first draft of your proposal. It’s a quick way to take a fresh look at how you describe your program and break away from deadly boilerplate text.

Never before has there been so much interest in federal grants. With the economic recovery program promising to distribute billions, the possibilities seem endless. But even with all that money available, there will be intense competition for those grants, which when distributed to all 50 states, may really not be all that much. As an example, a small part of the recovery program was $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, 40% of which was for the 50 state arts councils to use in making grants. That’s an average of $400,000 per state: not a tremendous amount, especially for the larger states.

When applying for an economic recovery grant, it is particularly important to make sure you follow directions and apply ahead of time. You can find info on all federal grants at www.grants.gov. To apply for one, you have to go through a lengthy registration procedure that can take days, so don’t wait until near the deadline to start the process.

Your tax dollars make federal grants possible, so don’t be shy about applying, just realize there are many others chasing the same finite amount of money.

Most grants are to some degree an exchange of something tangible (the grant money) for something intangible (the positive feeling the donor has from being able to do some good). When asking corporate funders for sponsorship, you’ll construct a package of both tangible and intangible benefits.

The tangible benefits you can offer may include access to your mailing list or a complementary advertisement in your program or on your web site. These are things that you normally sell, and so it’s easy to know what the value is for each. Intangible benefits, however, may be your most valuable assets. For example, the prestige of your nonprofit in the community provides an intangible benefit by association for your corporate sponsor.

You can read more about intangible benefits on my web site @ grantadviser.com. You’ll find a quick guide to writing corporate sponsorship proposals in my book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Grant Writing.

Although no one grows up wanting to be a fundraiser, there are certain character traits that successful fundraisers have in common. Chief among these is curiosity. Before you get started writing a grant, you will have a period of learning and discovery. You’ll learn how the program works, why the nonprofit is doing it, what its success have been, who has benefited from it, and much more. This should be one of, if not the, most satisfying parts of the process.

Similarly, you must be curious about people – those who will be executing the program for which you seek funding, those who will be served by the program, and those who will be making the decision whether to fund your program or not. The more you know about all three groups, the stronger your proposal will be.

You can read more about the characteristics of successful fundraisers in “Fundraising is for Everyone” on my web site, grantadviser.com.

Just think about what it must be like to be a program officer at a large foundation. Every day, the mail and email bring new proposals to be considered, most from very worthy and qualified nonprofits. Each must be read through and digested to decide if the foundation should consider them or not.

Now think what’s it’s like to open one of those proposals and encounter bad grammar, stilted use of language, jargon, and catch phrases. My guess is that that proposal moves to the bottom of the pile.

Now imagine opening a proposal written in a conversational tone. It feels like someone from the nonprofit is right there explaining to you what they do and why they deserve funding. The proposal doesn’t try to impress you with highbrow language, but rather with the quality of work done by the nonprofit. Top of the pile for this one!

On my web site, you can read more about writing well in "Writing a Proposal They Will Want to Read."

There are a number of excellent online databases to use in researching potential funders. Some of these I evaluated in my article in The Nonprofit Times. But before you begin researching online databases, be sure you have checked your own database thoroughly.

Your past supporters are your most likely future donors, too. Have you provided several opportunities for them to give to your nonprofit? Not asking is a major fault of many fundraising programs. Never drop a funder just because you received a negative response. Your request may have been lost in the mail or just arrived at a bad time in their funding process.

Follow up with a respectful phone call to see if they can share what went into their negative decision about your grant. Program officers can usually be quite helpful in this regard. In fact, you might want to call them to find out what went into their decision when they gave you a grant! That would be even more helpful. The more you communicate with the funder, the better chance you’ll have for success in the future.

Fundraisers must, of necessity, remain optimistic even in the bleakest times. But is the language you’re using reflecting a positive approach? Read a new article on my web site on The Power of Positive Writing.