Grants

Most online grant applications have strict character and/or word limits for your responses to each question. Enter one character too many and you receive a pop-up message saying you’ve gone over the limit, or your keystrokes are instantly stopped. You’ve been cut off, my fellow grant writer. But, take heart — with practice you can learn to do something you should probably be doing as a grant writer anyway — keeping your text concise while still retaining focus and meaning.

Foundation Source shares key findings from a recent survey of private foundation donors. Issued earlier this month to its 1,100 private foundation clients, the survey collected feedback from donors about their beliefs and perceptions about some of philanthropy’s current “hot-button” issues.

Results were derived from 198 respondents, the majority of whom have private foundations with less than $50 million in assets. Foundations of this size account for 98 percent of the approximately 86,000 private foundations in the U.S.

Jessica Brown, chief professional officer of the Boys and Girls Club of Central Appalachia, was thrown into the grant-writing world and quickly picked up on the ins and outs of the process. Along the way, she learned a lot. Check out Brown’s advice on mistakes you should never make when you’re undergoing the grant-writing process.

As any grant writer or development professional knows, it's not easy to get a funder to actually sit at the table. Here are a few tips designed to help you demonstrate to potential first-time funders that your project or program merits their support: Craft a strong needs statement. Don't forget letters of support. Don't hide your volunteers under a bushel. Show you have broad support in the community. Solicit matching grants. Be happy with small grants. Cast a wide net.

“How are we going to bring in more money? Let’s get creative, folks!” Employees at nonprofit organizations of varying shapes and sizes have heard this from upper management in one way or another. There are only so many sources of fundraising revenue, and traditional foundation grants, corporate grants and annual appeals can become stale very quickly. We wanted to show you that there are several ways to think outside the box and give you a few unconventional ideas that might spark a creative fundraiser for your organization!

Like it or not, grants are a necessity for nearly all nonprofits to stay alive and do good work. A couple of years ago, outreach, training and fundraising consultant Stephanie Gerding posted some great, basic grantseeking information on TechSoup For Libraries. As a former nonprofit development director, I know I could have used some short, useful, basic information on the steps to grantseeking to get things going quickly, so I thought I’d alert you to Stephanie’s wisdom.

Nearly half of nonprofit leaders say their foundation supporters are blind to the biggest challenges charities face and could do more to help them meet rising demand for services, train leaders and deploy new technology, according to a poll released this week.

In a survey of 121 nonprofit leaders, the Center for Effective Philanthropy says it found that only 52 percent “believe their foundation funders are aware of the various challenges their organizations face.”

The Google Grants program is a little-known offering by the search giant that is extremely generous and useful for nonprofit organizations. Although the criteria for this are rather specific, it offers qualifying organization up to $10,000 a month in free search advertising to promote their missions and initiatives through the AdWords system. This is a great opportunity for these organizations to get in front of Web-savvy contributors and volunteers. It also presents a golden opportunity to begin the process of reorienting efforts to a more Web-centric approach.

The most interesting fact to emerge from GrantStation's spring 2013 State of Grantseeking survey was that 81 percent of organizations that applied for grants won awards. The really interesting figure, however, was that the number of organizations that received awards increased 6.1 percent. How should this information affect your own grant strategy? First, you want to make sure you keep your grantseeking pipeline full. Second, you should set a goal of increasing your success rate by 5 percent or so over the next six months. How do you do that?

There is no secret formula, no magic bullet, no golden rule to a successful grant proposal. There are, however, a number of tools and approaches the creative grant writer can utilize to greatly increase the odds of success.