Idea 1: What do you want to accomplish?

We often have excellent “if only” or “what if” ideas, but then we get stumped about where to go from there. The best way to move forward is to break the task into stages and address each in order. The first question is, what do you want to accomplish?

Here’s how it works. You decide you want to reduce tobacco smoking. Great! But that’s too big for one project. You need to narrow it down. First consider how big of a project you and your organization can handle. One large organization could probably manage a project costing up to $1 million. A smaller group may need to limit aspirations to a $100,000-$250,000 project. I wrote a public health grant for a group of organizations applying together to make a big impact in one city, and the project was awarded more than $7 million. That was because they had a clear plan, clear goals, and enough feet on the ground to get the proposed work done.

You’ve decided your organization can handle a medium sized project, in the $250,000 range. Could be more, could be less, but that’s a starting point for both your plan and your efforts to find funding. Since you can’t do everything, you must narrow your focus. This decision should be tightly connected to your organization’s mission. Your other programs have primarily adult clients, so you will likely want to focus on adults, not juveniles. That’s your expertise. Do you want to reduce smoking in public places? In job environments? Or would you rather design a person-based program rather than a location based one?

Your adult programs focus on helping individuals change behaviors; you provide psychological counseling, money management guidance, and transition from welfare to work assistance. It would make sense to focus on the individual, rather than public policy.

Now you have it! You want to reduce smoking in adults through counseling and behavioral management, which utilizes your established areas of expertise. You want to design a program with a budget cap of around $250,000, which fits the size and capacity of your organization. It’s time to use that information to find an organization that wants to accomplish the same thing within that budget limit. It’s time to find a funder.   

Sneaky ways to find sponsors

Okay, not really sneaky. But not the usual google-it-or-go-to-a-database method.

Whatever field you're in, you likely have competitors, folks who would love to have the money or clients you've got. Part of what you do to sell yourself is to explain why you are better than some other person or company who is in the same field. To know what they're doing, you have to keep track of them. So you read industry newsletters or websites, you read articles published by or about them, and periodically you spend a little time browsing their website to see what they're up to.

Sponsor research!

Yep, that's one way to add sponsors to your list of potentials. Remember we said that matching your needs to a sponsor's wants is how you match with a good prospect. If a sponsor has given funding to someone in your field, then that sponsor is also a possibility for you. At the very least, you should investigate more. If the competitor got the funding because the wife of the sponsor's president is best friends with the director of the competitor, then maybe you don't have the best shot. But if the sponsor is now funding in your field, funding projects similar to yours, then they just may fund you.

So make it a habit when you're reading industry news to jot down all the funding awards received by competitors, or anyone who shares characteristics of yours that might trigger funding. That can be a lot things other than the actual content or goal of your project. If an organization just gave funding to a local school, and the reason was because they want to improve the city without limiting it to primary or secondary education, then a social service agency or higher education entity or arts venue might also be successful with a funding request. At the very least, research the sponsor. Even if only one of applications you send out as a result is actually funded, the return per hour spent would probably be worth it.

So Who Reviews These Proposals Anyway?

You think and write and plan until your eyes get red and burn from concentration.

You spend hours laboring over an Excel spreadsheet, testing your dedication to clean language as you build a budget.

You follow every. single. rule., checking them off diligently.

You mail the blasted proposal with hope and fear filling your heart in equal parts. The results of this could change your life.

Then, as the mailbox clangs shut, you think, Who reviews this proposal anyway?

It depends. But it matters.

The federal government generally has a pool of people willing to read proposals and offer comments on their fundability. They've been provided with the criteria that the federal agency considers most important, and how to measure the adherence to the criteria. They're content experts, people who know the field the grant proposes to address. Some will be direct content experts - if your proposal deals with particle physics, there will probably be particle physicists on the review committee. But most grant opportunities are not that narrowly defined. They may want "science having to do with exploring space", and the fields could include both the natural and social sciences. So you could have a sociologist reading your particle physics proposal. Thus, your project must be explained clearly enough that a non-physicist can understand the general gist, the scientific value, and the value to society as a whole. He or she won't be able to judge the science most likely; the content expert reviewer will do that. But you have to be able to make the case generally as well.

Private foundations vary wildly. They may be so tiny that your application will be a one-page letter sent to a person who does this once a year and gets only a dozen proposals. They may be so large their process is similar to what the federal government uses, or even more stringent. The bigger foundations often include a site visit as part of their process. The small foundations may not have content experts; the large ones will likely have a mix. There again, clarity of thought, language, and value are keys.

There's a lot more to know about this, and we'll get to that. But it's a start!

The Oxford Comma: The dispute settled

I am here to permanently settle the Oxford Comma dispute.

You didn't know there was a dispute? Or even what an Oxford Comma is?

For shame. For shame! Read on.

The Oxford Comma is about clarifying elements on a list. Here is a sentence with a list where the Oxford Comma is missing:

Tom saw ministers, Mark and Henry.

That can be interpreted two ways: Tom saw ministers named Mark and Henry, or Tom saw ministers, and Mark, and Henry. In the first, the ministers are Mark and Henry. In the second, the ministers are not Mark and Henry. So how do you know which is correct?

You add the Oxford Comma, that's how. An Oxford Comma is just the comma that is placed just before the "and" in a sentence with a list. Our sentence, with an Oxford Comma:

Tom saw ministers, Mark, and Henry.

There's only one interpretation of that sentence: Tom saw some ministers, he saw Mark, and he saw Henry. Three different sightings. Boom. 

Now some sentences are more easily understood. Marcus ate beans, corn and avocado is highly unlikely to be understood to say that corn and avocado are types of beans. But if you develop the habit of using the Oxford Comma, the uncomplicated sentences will not lose or increase in ease of understanding but complicated sentences are likely to increase in that quality. 

Remember that the ultimate goal of writing should be understanding between the writer and reader. The Oxford Comma aids in meeting that goal. 

IMHO, anyway. 

So You Have An Idea...

You have an idea so great that sponsors will line up to give you money to make it happen.

If they only knew about it.

Oh, wait. You have to explain the idea, in a way that lets the potential sponsor know you know what you're talking about, and you can make it happen. How do you do that?

You start by answering several simple questions about the idea. These are the foundation for your proposal to a sponsor, no matter how small or large, simple or complex your idea/project is.

What do you want to accomplish?
Who is your target market/client/audience?
Who will the activity/project happen with or to?
What resources will be needed to make it happen?
What tasks will have to be done to make it happen?
How long will it take to accomplish your goal(s)?
How will you prove it happened afterward?
How will you prove it accomplished your goal(s)?

When outlining your initial idea, you may have only one to three sentences answering each of these. As you develop the proposal, each of these will expand dramatically. It won't be intimidating by that point, because you have a blueprint, a map to follow.

We'll take each question individually in the coming weeks.

Now, go forth and think fundable thoughts!

THE RULES Part 1

Grant writing comes with lots of rules. I am not a fan of rules. Okay, some rules I'm all behind. I'm highly in favor of the "don't murder" one, and the "don't steal" one too. But a lot of rules have little to no defensible logic behind them. I struggle with those.

Many rules associated with grant writing can seem nit-picky and annoying. Trust me, I have picked some nits in my time, and been annoyed out of my black leather pointy-toed flats. I have wanted to plant one of those pointy toes right in a rule-maker's shin. Yet when you look closely at grant rules, the majority do have logic and are not that hard to follow.

And if you don't follow the rules of grant writing and submission? That great prose and stellar idea you spent hours and days and weeks crafting will land smack in the sponsor's trash bin. Even if you met the deadline.

Some sponsors have more pages of rules than they allow you to write for your submission. Every rule in there has to be followed. Some sponsors have so few rules you're not sure how to even ask for funding. You must somehow figure out how to approach them.

I will help you figure it out. But please, please... follow. every. rule. ALL of them. If the guidelines say it, do it. Just remember:

No rule is too small to trigger the trash bin.

Find your match!

You've signed up for an online dating site. How do you find your One True Love? First, you have to know what you need. Then you list what you have to offer. Finally, you look at the others on the site to decide who has what you need and wants what you offer.

Finding a good sponsor for your grant project happens just that way. Except for the dating site. Sort of.

There actually are "dating sites" for grant seekers, only they're called Grants.gov and FoundationCenter.org. There are others, but those are the main ones.

Grants.gov lists every currently open grant opportunity offered by the federal government. You can search it by keyword, agency, or other ways depending on what you're looking for.

Foundationcenter.org, which has a listing for every private non-profit fund-granting agency that filed taxes with the IRS in the previous year, has only a basic search function online. You have to have a subscription with them to get more user-friendly access. However, since they get their information free from the IRS (long story for another post), they are required to make their subscriber-level information free at several sites in each state. Check with public libraries and university libraries in larger towns/cities in your area to see if the Foundation Center database is available there. Most will have librarians on staff to walk you through the process.

Not sure how to figure out what you need or what you offer? Or how to decide what is an effective match? We'll talk about that as well in a later post!