Answer These Questions to Craft a Compelling Grant Proposal
Principal liz siddle discusses WHY Winning grants means shifting from making your case to showing how your work fits within a foundation’s broader vision for change
A mistake I see in grant proposals is focusing too much on making the case that your cause is important. One of the most important lessons I learned in my years as a grant writer is that nonprofits need to focus first on answering the foundation’s questions.
I understand the desire to make the case! During my 15+ years in grant writing, I did it a lot, too. As nonprofit professionals, we care deeply about our organizations and their missions. We want people to care about our cause as much as we do. And when it comes time to get funding, we think “because it’s important” is reason enough.
Unfortunately, that’s not the right approach. Foundation program officers have budgets, and they can fund only a few of the many applications they receive.
To make your proposals stand out in this crowded landscape, remember that program officers think in terms of using their grant portfolios to advance a strategy.
Let’s demystify foundations for a minute.
A foundation exists to give money away in alignment with a specific philanthropic vision. The board of trustees’ responsibility is to make sure its grantmaking aligns with the overall philanthropic vision, usually set by the founder or founder’s family at the time of formation. A program officer’s job (or trustee, if there is no staff) is to find groups doing work that can help achieve the vision.
Think of foundation staff and trustees as working alongside you in the community of organizations who care about a specific issue. You’re working toward the same goal, using different tools. Your tools are the programs and activities your organization carries out; their tool is funding a set of organizations to do those activities.
When a program officer reviews a proposal, they are looking to understand how your organization’s work fits within the overall suite of activities they’re already funding. That’s where you need to focus.
To use a real-life example, let’s say you are a local environmental organization trying to establish more parks in your community. You might apply to a foundation whose goal is to protect the environment. Your first inclination in writing the proposal is probably to marshal a few statistics showing how important parks are.
That’s a good first step…. but you can’t stop there. The foundation you’re applying to already funds environmental causes, and the program officer and trustees already know why parks are important. What they don’t know is what your organization is doing about parks, and how you would fit into their existing grant portfolio.
As a good fundraiser, you know your proposal needs to explain what the problem is that you’re trying to solve, and what is the solution you’re proposing. But you can’t stop there. The proposal also needs to address these questions:
How, specifically, does your organization advance the solution?
What unique role does your organization fill?
How does this fit with the foundation’s strategy and the rest of its grantmaking portfolio?
In our parks example, some answers might look like this:
The problem we seek to address is that community members lack access to green space.
The solution we propose is to create a park.
Of the various partners working to get the park established, our role is to raise money to buy the land that will become the park. Once the park is established, a different partner will manage the park and work with community members to plant trees and flowers and keep it free of trash.
This fits with the foundation’s overall strategy of protecting the local environment by creating more green space. Some of the project partners are groups the foundation already supports.
Answering these questions involves clarifying your case for support and learning as much as you can about the prospective funder’s strategy and grantmaking. Invest your time in these areas as you write, and your proposal process will be easier and more successful.
To learn more, join me for a free webinar on Tuesday, May 12 at 1 p.m. ET . If you have any questions, let us know!