Tips for Successful Grant Writing

This semester in my class at New York University, I have been using Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick as a companion text. It’s a great guide to writing clear, easily comprehensible and memorable text. One of their cautions applies to man of us writing grants” The Curse of Too Much Knowledge.”

You don’t have to tell everything you know about a subject in your grant proposal. Boil down the facts to the essential things the funder needs to know. Keep it interesting and simple.

By the way, my class for the spring semester starts on February 27, 2012.

Take a look at my list of the The 10 Most Common Grant Writing Mistakes on the Idiot’s Guides web site. By simply avoiding the most common errors, you can put your proposal ahead of hundreds of others.

The 3rd edition of my book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Grant Writing, will be released on July 5. It will now be available in most popular digital editions including Kindle, Nook, and iPad and iPhone. Of course, a print edition is also available. Publication date is July 5!

For the penultimate session of my grant writing class at New York University, the aspiring grant writers were thrust into the roles of foundation program officers and trustees. A group of students were given proposals to evaluate and then present to the other group, who took on the role of foundation trustees who had to decide which proposal would receive the $10,000 grant. (The two groups then reversed roles for Round II.)

This made for some surprising discussions and some disagreement between the “program officers” and the “trustees.” The merits of the proposals was one criteria they both used, but when wearing the trustee hat, the students were just as interested in where the grant would have the greatest impact, which might be with the second-best proposal.

Elements of grantsmanship also came into play. Proposals presented clearly and with passion got the highest scores from the “program officers.”

All of us taking part in this exercise (including me) came away with a new sense of how difficult it can be to decide among competing proposals. The importance of the skill of the grant writer was certainly evident, but it was also clear that funding decisions are made through a complex process balancing the worthiness of a project, ability of an organization to carry it out, and the impact that can be made with a specific grant.

So you’ve subscribed to an expensive online database that promises to contain all you need to know about grant makers. You find several prospects whose interests match your project. Time to start writing the cover letter, right?

No! You’ve just taken the first step in researching these funders. Why?

1. Never depend on one source of information to tell you all you need to know about a funder. Online databases might be out of date or have errors. Confirm everything by visiting the funder’s own website. But don’t consider the funder’s site the final word either. Many are very of our date. Check out the funder’s 990PF form on Guidestar.org or a similar site to see what grants they have actually made.

2. You need to know everything about the funder, but you also need to know about the people associated with the funder. This is important to find possible connections with your nonprofit and also to help you personalize the cover letter. If the person you are addressing is a recognized authority on the subject of your project, you’ll write to them in more technical language than to someone who isn’t. And if you discover the addressee has kids in the same school system as the one for which you’re seeking support, you can refer to activities she might know about.

I’m leading a session at the National Arts Marketing and Development Conference on Sunday afternoon, March 20, at New York University’s Kimmel Center on “Making the Case for Your Arts Organization.” All of us use the arts’ economic impact when defending government funding in particular, but is this the best argument for support or just the only one we’re comfortable using? Where did this argument come from? What are the alternatives? Join me for this session and explore the other viable cases for support. (Note that members of several arts service organizations receive discounts for the conference. See the bottom of the linked page above for a list.)

See my reference page on support of the arts.

A recent article in Fundraising Success magazine provides guidelines to determine if your organization is ready to apply for grants. Among the things you should ask yourself are:
-Where are you in your organizational life cycle? Brand new organizations will have a harder time making the case they are ready to receive a grant to carry out a program.
-What is your program track record? Funders want to fund successful organizations.
The entire article is certainly worth a read.

Alpha books has just published my The Complete Idiot’s Mini Guide to Writing and Winning a Grant as an e-book for only $1.99. It contains the essential information about constructing an proposal narrative. It is essentially Chapter 14 in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Grant Writing.

On Wednesday, January 19, 2011, I’ll be teaching my introduction to grant writing class for Opera America as part of its Making Connections series. Cost is only $15 for members and $20 for non-members.

In March 2011, I join the faculty of New York University’s Heyman Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising. The first class I’ll teach there is “Fundraising for the Arts,” which will examine how to make the case for support of the arts, arts education, and artists. Classes are Monday evenings, March 7 through April 4. Then on Tuesday evening, April 5, I begin a six-session course on grant writing. I’m looking forward to covering in depth what necessarily goes by very quickly in my one-session workshops.

It’s not enough to describe your project — you need to make a convincing case for why the funder should support your project rather than one of the other hundreds (or thousands) of proposals it receives. “Making the case” should be the primary focus of your proposal, and everything you write should support your case.

So what’s your “case?” In fundraising, we use “case” to mean the reason or argument that states convincingly why someone should support your cause. If your charity is a food bank, your case would involve why your charity is uniquely equipped to distribute food to the needy. It’s not enough to state how many people you feed. You must go beyond that to explain how your food bank works efficiently or reaches hard-to-reach populations, for example.

Organizations offering arts education frequently reply on secondary effects of the arts to convince funders to make a grant. One of the most common arguments for providing arts education is that many studies have shown that studying the arts helps students perform better on standardized tests. Other studies have shown how the arts improve specific life-skills, like critical analysis and empathy with other people. It can be dangerous, however, to quote general studies that use programs that differ in the details from your own. Always assume the funder has read the entire study and don’t quote findings out of context. (Check out my reference links for making the case for the arts.)

Whatever your “case,” you need to state it succinctly and convincingly. It should not contain unsupported assertions or leave unanswered questions. When the funder reads it, you want him or her to think “yes.” That “yes” will hopefully lead to another “yes” at the end of your proposal and result in a grant for your charity.