The Everything Grant Writing Book

Create the perfect proposal to raise the funds you need

Nancy Burke, Judy Tremore

• Publisher: Everything
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781440524547
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Writing
• Index: Business

Expert advice to create the perfect proposal and raise the funds you need! If you're a fundraiser, you know that raising money is the key to every nonprofit's success. But the competition for funds can be fierce and the obstacles many. The Everything ® Grant Writing Book gives you the insider information you need to get past the gatekeepers, beat out the competition, and obtain those much-needed funds.This completely updated guide shows you how to:
--Do the necessary research to find available grants
--Write an effective statement of need
--Build community collaborations and partnerships
--Develop a budget and budget narrative
--Format effective letters of inquiry
--Write proposals for capital projects
--Find current online foundation resources
--Focus on sustainability, the most important concept in philanthropy todayFrom writing letters of inquiry and developing action plans to outlining and drafting proposals, The Everything ® Grant Writing Book helps you get the funds you need—every time!

Chapter 1

The World of Grant Writing

The first thing you try to learn when you intend to live in another country is the language. The same is true of venturing into the world of grantmaking: You’ll need to learn the language. Key terms are listed in Appendix A, but you’ll come to understand the “flavor” of the language as you read through this book. Chapter 1 provides the foundation you will need for learning more about grant writing.

What Is a Grant Proposal?

Grants are gifts made by a charitable-giving foundation or the government, most often to a nonprofit organization; that is, an organization designated a 501(c)(3) by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Grants are most often made to support the operations, special projects, or other activities of a nonprofit organization for a specific period of time. Grant proposals are submitted as requests for grant funding. Proposals include a narrative, forms, and attachments. It is the grant writer’s responsibility to create, complete, and compile these documents.

Foundations are prohibited from making grants to individuals. Instead, individuals with needs such as housing, transportation, counseling, or health care must seek those services from a nonprofit organization. The nonprofit organization, in turn, seeks funding from grantmakers to provide those services.

Who Writes Grants?

While some individuals, such as inventors, and some businesses—particularly those in product development, research, defense, and construction—apply for grants, nonprofit organizations account for the majority of grant seekers.

That’s because nearly all nonprofit organizations must seek grants to develop new programs or sustain operations. In smaller nonprofit agencies, the work of grant seeking and grant writing is often assigned to the executive director. Larger organizations often hire a fund development officer to do those jobs. On occasion, you’ll find program directors assigned responsibility for seeking grants to support the organization’s programs or ideas. Sometimes, a nonprofit’s board of directors requests that staff pursue a specified number of grants or raise a specific amount of money through grant writing in any given year.

As executive directors of nonprofits have become busier and busier, the need for professional grant-writing services has grown consistently in the past several years, and shows no sign of slowing. That’s where you come in.

Whether you’re already a freelance writer and want to develop a new market for your work, grant writing is one of your job responsibilities, or you simply want to assist a favorite charity in a unique way, writing grant proposals can compensate you in two ways. You’ll not only earn a living, but you’ll also feel good about the contribution you make to improving your community and the lives of the people in it. And for many grant writers, that’s almost as satisfying as the money itself.

The Grant-Writer’s Market

Some individuals and businesses write grants, but your primary market is the nonprofit sector. Among those applying for grants are the following groups:

• Religious organizations
• Social service agencies of all kinds
• Schools
• Hospitals and clinics
• Governmental units (some also solicit and fund grant proposals)
• Colleges and universities
• Police/fire departments
• Public-access media
• Arts and cultural organizations

Four Absolutely Essential Skills

Above all as a grant writer, you must do four things and do them well and consistently.

First, have empathy for your readers. That means always writing directly to an audience. Learn who will be reading your grant proposals—often either a program officer at a foundation or a volunteer in a government office. Take care to understand what they need to know and how best to explain it to them.

Second, always meet your deadlines. If the grant arrives past the given deadline, even an hour late, it will not be reviewed! You may be able to resubmit the same grant to the same granting organization, but it’s very likely that the next deadline will be a year or more away. Your nonprofit client will not be pleased; the organization may have been counting on that money for its next budget cycle.

Third, you must be able to read and follow instructions. This is more important than having a good writing style, good client relations, or even a successful grant-writing track record. While foundations are not as stringent, many government offices will throw your proposal into the trash unread, unreviewed, and, needless to say, unfunded, if you don’t follow the instructions contained in the requests for proposals (RFP).

A fourth critical skill of grant writers is being a good “test taker.” You must be able to read questions thoroughly, analyze the question for clues to the best answer, and provide the answer that best responds to the core of the question. A common downfall of many grant writers is that they answer questions with information they want to tell the granting agency, rather than with information the granting agency is requesting.

Interpreting the questions is the first step in writing a successful grant proposal and a skill that you’ll perfect with experience. Focus on your audience and respond accordingly.

Grant Writing Versus Fundraising

A grant writer is most often a writer with a specialty, though she may also do fundraising. A fundraiser may write grants as part of his job. But most often, a fundraiser is a person on staff who is assigned to general fundraising duties.

Fundraising duties can include nurturing long-term donors, developing candidates and plans for bequests, planning and executing fundraising events or speaker series, managing a database of donors, developing year-end and mid-year letter campaigns, and other similar responsibilities. Larger organizations usually have someone on staff assigned to fundraising, and often that person is called a development director.

While many development directors can and have written grants, they become so busy with the other requirements of their jobs that grant writing becomes a sideline for them or something they seek from an outside source, such as a professional grant writer.

Two Approaches

You will approach grant seeking in one of two ways: either as a response to a Request for Proposals (RFP); or proactively, through searching for matches between foundation guidelines and your nonprofit organization’s mission. Government funding is most often accessed through an RFP process. Foundations sometimes issue RFPs for specific projects or initiatives, but most often present guidelines describing the location and types of organizations and projects they are interested in funding.

Some foundations are beginning to change their guidelines to look for ways to fund operations in nonprofits that are vital to the community or that have demonstrated “best practices” in their fields. However, most foundations still prefer to fund unique projects developed in response to a community need.

Whether you are writing to guidelines or an RFP, the grant proposal is formulaic; it includes instructions that, in the case of RFPs particularly, must be followed exactly. You also must use the accepted language and approach set forth by your reading audience.

Grant proposals are most often written to seek funding for a specific project within a larger organization. Projects may be capital (for construction, acquisition, or renovation of buildings) or programmatic (to support staffing, equipment, and other items that are necessary to launch a special project). Though it was once rare for grants to be made for operations (utilities, ongoing staffing costs, etc.), operating-fund grants are becoming more common today. Foundation grantmakers are just beginning a trend to ensure that the most outstanding and necessary nonprofit organizations are sustained with operating grants. This trend is an outgrowth of an increased emphasis by all grantmakers on sustaining programs once they are launched.

What Kinds of Projects Get Funded?

There are two key factors that often determine whether or not a grant proposal is successful: a creative response to a problem or need; and the potential for sustaining the project and its outcomes after the grant period ends.

Maggie is a freelance grant writer who works with various nonprofits to help them get grant money. In the early 1990s, Maggie received a call from a potential client in her state who wanted to meet with her to share his ideas and enlist her help writing grants to fund the project. He had already purchased a building and was in the process of renovating it into a hospital/orphanage for children born with AIDS.

As part of Maggie’s interview with the client, she asked him why he had chosen this particular project. He responded that his primary reasons were that funders like projects that benefit children, that AIDS was a priority social/health issue of the time, and that the two together seemed a natural way for him to launch his new career in human services.

There’s a reason that a statement of need or problem statement comes first in a grant proposal; all projects should identify and respond to a proven need in the community or identify a problem and its resolution. Make sure the need or situation can be supported with testimony or data before you write proposals for funding.

To Maggie, the project seemed opportunistic, manipulative, and motivated more by self-interest than interest in others. She did some research and learned that other long-standing service organizations had also discussed similar programs until they learned that a children’s AIDS center was not necessary. One executive director told her, “We thought it might be an important contribution to society, but we learned that there are thousands of foster families that are more than willing to take in children with AIDS. We believe those children would be far better served in a family environment than an institution, so we simply scrapped the idea.”

What are the attributes of “fundable” projects? A project and/or the organization proposing a project must have most of the following:

• Strong and recent data to support the need for the project or to describe the problem to be addressed
• An experi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Top Ten Reasons to Learn Grant Writing
• Introduction
• 1 The World of Grant Writing
• 2 Finding the Money
• 3 Government Grants
• 4 Foundation Grants
• 5 The Right Source
• 6 Grant-Seeker Workshops and Conferences
• 7 Letters of Intent and Inquiry
• 8 Components of a Grant Proposal
• 9 Preparing to Write
• 10 Planning for Letters of Support
• 11 Writing a Statement of Need
• 12 Writing Goals, Objectives, and Outcomes
• 13 Writing Action Plans and Timelines
• 14 Designing an Evaluation Plan
• 15 Developing a Budget and Budget Narrative
• 16 Other Grant-Proposal Sections
• 17 Capital-Grant Proposals
• 18 Write It Well
• 19 Reviewing Your Work
• 20 Filling Out Forms
• 21 Packaging and Submitting Your Proposal
• 22 Next Steps
• 23 Writing Grants as a Career
• Appendix A Glossary
• Appendix B Resources
• Appendix C Sample Federal Grant Proposal
• Appendix D Sample Foundation Grant Proposal
• Appendix E Sample Capital Grant Proposal
• Index