This is a collection of Michael’s grants articles that were published in the Charity Channel Grants & Foundation Review (which he edited from 2003 to 2009). Since full access to Grants & Foundation Review requires Charity Channel membership, we’re posting these for your reading enjoyment. However, we encourage you to check out Charity Channel and Grants & Foundation Review, which publishes weekly articles from dozens of grant professionals.
A couple of years ago I got one of those dinnertime telemarketing phone calls. But as I was getting ready to give my “I’m not interested” speech, the caller said “You can get $8,000 in free government grants to do anything you want with. And you never have to pay it back.” So of course as a grantwriter I decided to hear him out. He said they would have a local representative contact me, all I had to do was give him my bank account information and mother’s maiden name so they could deduct $299.95 for the service. I made up some numbers and a name, but when I asked questions about a phone number where I could call back or an address he wouldn’t tell me, only that my local representative would give me that information. He did say the name of the company was National Grant Services.
Nonprofit charitable organizations are curious institutions in American law, defined more by what they aren’t than what they are, because of the way the Internal Revenue Code has evolved. If you think about it, a nonprofit institution is: not for profit, exempt from taxes, and not a private foundation. So what does this mean, and how does it work?
A typical nonprofit may submit a dozen, or 50, or 100 proposals a year and have maybe 30% of them funded. As a grantwriter, how do you keep track of them? In the course of that year, you or someone in your organization may talk to foundation or government agency staff countless times. How do [...]
Unlike many private foundations, the Federal Government acknowledges that it costs money to run your agency, above and beyond the costs of providing direct services. These administrative overhead or “indirect” costs are the things that keep your organization operating smoothly and efficiently, but are not tied to any one .
In many cases with larger grants and complex projects you’ll want or need to hire an outside evaluator. Sometimes you’ll want to prove the effectiveness of a program and need someone with specialized skills to oversee control groups, do statistical analysis, and so forth.
For many grantwriters, evaluation competes with finances as the least favorite part of developing proposals. It seems terribly complex, it can feel like it’s forced on you by funders, and you may experience resistance from the program people whose cooperation you need to develop a good proposal. The evaluation section is treated as a necessary evil and an afterthought — something you throw together after the real work of your proposal is done. As a result, it is often one of the weakest parts of many people’s grants. In a competitive funding round, a strong evaluation section may make the difference between getting funded or turned down.
Sometimes a nonprofit will be asked to act as a fiscal sponsor for another group which wants grant funding, or to allow use of its tax exempt status to facilitate contributions to another group or individual. The “fiscal sponsor” relationship is often assumed to be simple. It isn’t, so if you’re considering entering into this arrangement from any role, read this article first.
How will you know your grant project succeeded? The answer can be very different for a local community group funded by a local foundation than a social service program applying for a large federal grant. In one case it can be just looking whether you met the program goals for numbers served, in the other it may need control groups and a statistician. This article tells how to know which approach is appropriate, how to do an informal in-house evaluation, when in the grant process to involve a professional evaluator (early) and making sure you have outcomes that can be evaluated.
To some grantwriters, the budget seems cut and dried. It tells how much money you need to carry out the project described in your narrative. It’s often left for the fiscal or program folks to develop. This “hands off” approach misses the opportunity to use the budget to support your narrative and strengthen your proposal.
For many grantwriters the evaluation section at the end of a proposal is either an annoyance, a necessary evil, or something to be turned over to the “professional evaluators”. The fun parts of writing the proposal like developing goals and objectives, describing programs and defining community need are approached separately from evaluation. Direct service staff like counselors often look on evaluation as an imposition that gets in the way of their real work, or an attempt to make them look bad.
