I do a lot of “teaching” in my everyday work as a grant consultant. Every time the phone rings with an inquiry into my services, I generally end up assessing, and then “teaching,” about grant readiness, grant timelines, the importance of individual donors, partnerships and collaboration, or the importance of assessing their prospect potential before entering into grants.
- Grant Readiness: It’s not just about having your 501c3 or knowing where your 990 is! Grant readiness is about organizational and fiscal structure and strength, board strength, and your agency’s ability to manage a grant.
- Grant Timelines: When beginning a new grant program within your agency, you should expect it to take at least 18 months to reap ANY benefits. Even more for a new organization, since many funders want three years of audited financials. Funder deadlines also play a huge part.
- Individual Donors: Not only do individual donations account for 70% of all philanthropy (grants are about 17%), but a strong individual donor base makes you more attractive to grant funders. Plus, an annual fund drive becomes its own pipeline to stability.
- Partnerships and collaborations: They actually convey strength, flexibility, cooperativity, communicativeness, and an ability to think outside yourself – all strengths in a grant funder’s eyes! If a micro-agency allies itself with a mega-agency, the micro-agency looks much stronger.
- Prospect potential: Diving into the world of grants without knowing if the funding is out there is putting the cart before the horse. I always advise agencies starting out in grants to conduct prospect research FIRST to determine if there’s enough potential to invest in the initiative.
I advise my clients too. On all matters grant-related, but also donor relations, project design, project management, and sustainability.
- Donor relations: Funder relations is the same as donor relations. Grant funders don’t like being treated as an ATM, and we shouldn’t treat them that way. So pick up the phone! Talk to them! Involve them! They wouldn’t have funded you if they didn’t care how you’re helping them fulfill their mission.
- Project design: As a grant writer, I am always faced with the tried-and-true questions about measurable outcomes. I ask those questions early: how are we measuring this? And if grant reporting is seeming onerous, I take it back to the program’s design – design measurements into the program and reporting can happen organically.
- Project management: A successful new program needs project (and grants) management built in. If you don’t account for oversight of all the moving parts of a new program in the budget (and in the design), integrated with all the other things you have going on in your agency, you’ll run the risk of that new program actually losing you money.
- Sustainability: If a project/program has sustainability built into its design, beautiful! Because we have to answer that question in every single application. Asking a funder to support one key purchase to make a program sustainable is one thing; asking for a thing that just has to be replaced year after year ad infinitum is NOT sustainable, it’s stop-gap funding.
The list goes on. But as you can see, grant writing in the consulting world involves a lot of teaching, coaching, training. If you’re a staff grant writer, you likely find yourself doing a lot of this work too, peer-to-peer, or coaching up. Why is that? Are grants such a mystery?
It’s a good thing I like teaching. I do enjoy helping unravel that mystery we call grants for people. I’ve had the opportunity to take what I’ve learned about grant writing over the years and share it with my AFP and GPA colleagues, and with agencies nationally and locally. I get excited for new chances to share what I know.
I have organized a range of topics I go into detail on, and a sampling appears on my website’s Solutions page. I’m building new content all the time, because learning is a passion of mine and I’m always building and growing.
And I’m always encouraging others to share their knowledge too. ‘You know more than you think you do,’ I tell them. ‘You have a lot to share!’ What do you noodle on that makes you excited? Take that one little smidgen of inspiration and build it out (they used to call it ”workshop it”), then share it! I’ll show up and cheer you on!
For more on this and other grant topics, visit my website
