Clear away myths and fears
September 15th, 2005
Too many well-meaning staff and volunteers let themselves get bogged down in unproductive attitudes and habits about grants. But it’s possible to get more grant money while reducing hassle and anguish. The key is dismissing myths and fears and taking on a more empowered point of view, where your organization is a true equal partner in the grantmaking agreement.
Chapter 1 of Demystifying Grant Seeking shows you how. It is reproduced here with the permission of Jossey-Bass Publishers.
CHAPTER 1. CLEAR AWAY MYTHS AND FEARS
Perhaps this sounds familiar –
You’re staying late at work the night before the proposal is due — very late. Even the intern went home hours ago. You put on another pot of coffee and slog once again through the 20 pages you’ve written. Then you spend extra money on FedEx to get the proposal in on time. You swear that after tonight you’re not applying for any more grants. You just don’t see how the few grants you get are worth the agony.
Or perhaps you supervise a staff person who handles grant writing, but they just don’t seem to be getting that many checks in… or that many proposals out in the mail, for that matter. Perhaps they’re caught up in other development projects or their time is limited. You’d rather not bug them one more time about a grant resource they’re neglecting to
tap into. You wonder whether you will ever see results.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Grants are part of almost every nonprofit’s world, whether your organization receives dozens of them, or you are just beginning to wonder about them. Grants can be a substantial and meaningful funding source for many kinds of projects and organizations. And they can be a source of great hope and excitement.
At the same time, few subjects in nonprofit management are surrounded by such fear and mystery. Few tasks are faced with such dread as writing and submitting grant proposals. Because you may never know why you do or don’t get funded, it’s common to look at grant funding as an irrational or chaotic process. Grant makers can seem cruel or fickle.
Nonprofits that are agonized by grant seeking act in accordance with these beliefs. When they hear about a grant opportunity, they scramble to design a program that fits the guidelines, or work all night to get a confused proposal in the mail by the deadline. They conduct their grant seeking as an intermittent series of desperate crap shoots, which
we call “episodic” grant seeking. The odds of success are poor. Nationally, only 1-10% of grant proposals are funded, according to a review in Dennis P. McIlnay’s How Foundations Work.
The effective grant seeker believes something completely different — that, for all the hype, grant seeking and grant making are understandable and fairly rational processes. They run a steady, intelligent, fearless grant seeking effort that minimizes work and
pushes their odds well above the average — by targeting the funders most compatible with their organization, by cultivating professional relationships with those funders, and by organizing their efforts for efficiency.
This book gives you simple techniques you can use and habits you can develop to become this kind of grant seeker. But before you try to apply them, you need to free yourself of some common misconceptions about grant seeking, and get a more realistic idea of what you should and shouldn’t expect from the process.
Myth: Grants are something for nothing
Reality: Grants are rational deals between colleagues
Grants are appealing because they look like big chunks of free money. Unlike most individual donations, grants are often large enough to actually buy something: to fund a whole program for an entire year, or to purchase a major piece of equipment. And to get a grant, you just send in an application. The funder sends back a check, and you don’t
need to pay it back. A grant seems like manna from heaven, or a winning lottery ticket.
This perspective feeds some unfortunate practices and beliefs. Buying a lottery ticket takes no skill, so nonprofits that see grant seeking as gambling apply on impulse, without preparation; they assign the wrong people to work on proposals, or they place no value on the work of a skilled grant seeker. Logically, the only way they can increase their
chances of winning a lottery is to buy more tickets, so some organizations practice the “spray and pray” method of grant seeking: sending out scores of identical proposals, hoping a few will “hit” and provide a windfall. Similarly, some nonprofits go “fishing” for funds, returning to the same foundations over and over again hoping to eventually get a “bite.” Worse, some nonprofit staffers become sycophants, flattering grant makers, and hoping this will provide an edge or an “in.”
These methods are recipes for resentment and wasted labor. Rejections of desperate, heartfelt proposals naturally fuel the attitude that grant makers are fickle and unfair. Winning (or losing) a grant on the basis of flattery and connections, rather than on the merits of the proposal, can’t do much but create a malaise that few at idealistic
nonprofits will be comfortable with. And sending out scores of ill-considered proposals wastes a lot of work, not to mention paper and postage, considering that none are likely to be funded.
Grants are not free money. Foundations and other grant makers are organizations like your nonprofit. They have missions and goals just like you do. When a funder awards you a grant, they are not doing so solely out of the goodness of their hearts. Rather, what you plan to do with the money fits in with their own goals, initiatives, and dreams, and often with their founder’s stated wishes.
It makes sense to see a grant as a fair deal between colleagues whose interests are similar, but whose resources are different. Your nonprofit and the funder have similar goals, for example, housing the homeless. The funder has money to use for work toward that goal. Your nonprofit has the capability to do the work, with shelter space, expert
staff, connections with health care providers, and so on. Your organization performs the work in exchange for the money. Your organization and its programs have a value that is equal to grant money.
If you can recognize this value, you will stop praying, fishing, and flattering for grants. You will begin to look for and see matches with funders whose interests and goals are most like yours. You will behave less like a supplicant or gambler, and more like a partner with
funders. You will handle rejection better, too, because you will be able to conceive that it is possible that some other organization had a proposal that fit the funder’s goals just as much as yours.
Acknowledging the full value of your own organization and its programs isn’t always easy. Grant seekers and grant makers are bound up in a status relationship so deeply ingrained it is sometimes difficult to recognize. Grant seekers are accustomed to — even proud of — being poor, fighting for recognition and justice, and having to beg for money. They have a lower status than grant makers, who often play the part of exclusive or “noble” organizations.
This status difference seems to come from a belief that money (or the ability to give it away) is more respectable than expertise, ability, or action. It hasn’t helped that some funders have been willing to take on a superior role, hiding behind unlisted phone numbers or gate-keepers, and making forbidding statements like one we heard recently: “Dr. X prefers not to meet with anyone.” At one workshop we attended, a program officer from a well-known national foundation seemed to admit his organization found ambiguity convenient, when he said “It is the policy of the foundation to not be comfortable with
getting too clear.”
The pecking order is perpetuated every day, when nonprofits flatter and supplicate in their grant seeking. They are just as complicit as funders, coming to believe they are “owed something” for their good work. They attempt to play their low status role to their advantage, appealing to those higher up with their incredible need and devotion, and some grants consultants might advocate you adopt this role. But no matter how we in the nonprofit world martyr ourselves for the good of our causes, funders are free to make their own decisions.
While it is unproductive to demand or expect to be funded just because foundations “have to give it away,” it might empower you to remember that a funder’s money can do little good for the community unless it is invested — for example, in organizations like yours. Funders need nonprofits to spend their money effectively, just as much as nonprofits need funders to pay for our programs.
It’s also encouraging to remember that though grant seeking seems surrounded by mystery, it is basically a rational process. Usually, some or all of the criteria used to award a grant are presented in writing, and if you are not awarded a grant, you may be able to find out why. Often it is because your organization did not fit the written guidelines, or unwritten but discernable priorities of the foundation trustees.
That’s not to say grant making is 100% fair. Even fair deals between colleagues involve some intangible elements, like trust, and any process involving money is open to misunderstanding and corruption. Even at the fairest of trustee meetings, very good programs and proposals can end up as the least important ones on the table.
Still, there are many elements of the process you have control over — for example, which funders you apply to, how you relate to those funders, which information you present to them, how it is presented, and how you organize your efforts. Efficient grant seekers make more money in less time because they take charge of these parts of the
process — the parts they can control — rather than leaving them to vagaries of flattery, hope, or luck.
Myth: Writing grant proposals is an ordeal
Reality: Proposal writing is predictable and simple
Though the specific requirements of grant makers vary, and your proposals should be tailored for each funder, all grant applications involve just one basic activity: responding to a set of questions about your nonprofit organization and its programs. This set of questions varies little from funder to funder. For example: Who and how many
people will be served by program X? How will the effectiveness of program Y be evaluated? What other organizations do you collaborate with? What other funds have you sought?
If you know your organization and its programs well, answering these questions will be a fairly straightforward process. The experience of grant writing as an ordeal — staying up all night, agonizing, and racing the envelope to FedEx at the last second — comes not from the nature of grant seeking, but from predictable situations at nonprofits that are desperate for money but ill-prepared to answer key questions.
Presented with a grant opportunity, some nonprofits try to design whole new projects from scratch at the last second, so they can apply with something that fits the funding requirements. We strongly object to this practice on the grounds of both practicality and principle.
In purely logistical terms, designing a new program is naturally hard work that takes a long time, and must be done before the questions in a grant proposal can be answered. It’s work most appropriately done by an organization’s program staff, who are the experts on day-to-day operations. An experienced member of the development staff, such as yourself, might have skills in spotting good programs and be able to help design a new one, but you will never want to invent a new program without the cooperation of program staff. You could get funded for a program that is not ready to roll, and have serious trouble following through. You might even have to return the money.
Or you might raise the money, your organization might follow through,
and you’d “get away” with it. This can create what nonprofit managers
call “mission creep,” when your mission changes due to external
factors, such as money. Why would you want to be involved in such a
transaction? If you’re like many fundraisers, you got involved in
nonprofits because you really believed in a cause or program. It’s our
opinion that you should hang on to that idealism and use it as your
guiding star, rather than pursuing funding for funding’s sake, or
creating bureaucracies that no one believes in.
A better way to operate is for you, the grant seeker, to ask the
program staff basic questions about your organization and relevant
programs, and use their answers to write grant proposals. If the
program staff have trouble answering the kinds of questions foundations
often ask, they probably need to think out their ideas or document
their experience more carefully before they ask you to write a
proposal. As you become experienced with grant seeking, your role as
development staff should be to help program planners ask themselves the
right questions. Chapter 4 of this book contains exercises to help both
development and program staff collect the answers you’ll need to know
before applying for any grant.
When you know your organization well, and programs are fully designed
and ready for grant seeking, the actual writing of grant proposals
turns out to be easy. After creating a few of them, you’ll notice that
though the order or wording of the questions may vary from funder to
funder, the questions themselves are very much the same.
The requirements of grant applications are repetitive and predictable.
As a consequence, making an investment in preparation and organization
will speed the writing and assembling of all your proposals. Several
chapters in this book describe how you can anticipate needs and have
much of the necessary material ready before you even think of applying
to any particular funder.
In fact, grant seeking involves so much organization, preparation, and
clerical tasks that it is more trouble than it’s worth to apply for one
or two grants. If you make an investment of time in setting up a grant
seeking system, you can easily apply for 10 or 20 grants instead of
one. And if you make a steady, consistent effort, even if it is
low-key, chances are that your investment will eventually pay off.
You’ll be left with more time to spend any way you want — on the finer
points of each proposal, on your other job duties, or on sleep.
Myth: All you need is one well-written grant proposal
Reality: Winning grants depends on pinpointing matches and tailoring proposals
As consultants, we have been approached by many nonprofit organizations
each asking us to write a single “boilerplate” proposal for them — one
they can send out to many funders. This is the kind of job we don’t
take, because a single grant proposal is right only for the funder for
which it is written, and sending it to dozens of funders at once is
usually a waste of resources. Grant makers can tell when they’ve been
sent a form letter, and it likely makes them feel just about as special
as you do when you get a letter from Ed McMahon.
Grant proposals all have similar elements, and a few funders even
accept Common Grant Application forms, which save administrative time
for applicants. However, every proposal — even one submitted on a
Common form — should have at least a cover letter that points out how
the program in question specifically matches with the funder’s mission
and goals. As a grant seeker, you will spend time making crucial
decisions about what we call “matches” — which programs you will
present to which funders, and for how much funding. Sending a
boilerplate proposal skips over the important steps of matching the
potential funder with your program, and presenting the match in a way
that this particular funder will find pertinent and compelling. It also
skips over the brief but essential task of updating your text with the
most recent changes in your program goals and community trends, which
can lend a sense of timeliness and relevance to your proposal.
Myth: You need to “know someone” to get a grant.
Reality: You don’t need to know anyone to start, and relationships can be built as you go.
One Monday morning two years ago, we observed an otherwise rational
program director come into a weekly staff meeting in a state of
tremendous excitement. Over the weekend, he had been best man at a
wedding, where he had met the brother-in-law of a trustee from a big
foundation! He thought this personal contact had won a crucial “in” for
our organization — regardless of the fact that we didn’t even meet the
foundation’s guidelines for grant funding.
Many people have heard relationships are crucial to foundation
fundraising, and in general that is true. However, the crucial
relationships in steady, systematic grant seeking aren’t personal
friendships or “ins.” Instead, they are business relationships built on
confidence and mutual regard — the elements necessary to work together
in a significant way. Consider how you might react if someone asked you
for a dime for their project. You’d probably give ten cents to anyone,
stranger or friend, without much thought or expectation. But if someone
asked you for a thousand dollars, you might reasonably wonder what kind
of track record they had, if you could trust them to follow through,
and how their success or failure might reflect on you.
Similarly, many small grants, and once in a while a large one, are
awarded with zero personal contact and no pre-existing relationships.
We had the experience of starting from scratch with an organization
that had no existing business relationships with foundations, and we
raised 10% of that organization’s budget through grants in our first
year there, working entirely through the mail.
For larger or more significant grants, you will need relationships, but
fortunately they can be initiated and cultivated by you in a
businesslike way. You might be introduced to foundation staff or
trustees through public knowledge of your program’s work, a personal
introduction by a trusted colleague, or a record of successful use of
prior grant funds — for example, small grants you got through the mail.
These elementary relationships can be crucial because they provide an
accepted context to build up positive background information about your
organization before the next funding decision is made. Assuming you
have a good program, it’s likely the better a grant maker knows you,
the more they will trust you as a steward of their funds.
An efficient grant seeker sends a steady stream of good information to
funders, without going overboard. You want to develop an evolving
relationship of collaboration, in which you consistently provide proof
that your organization is a responsible and effective partner in their
efforts. Such relationships can position your organization to be a
serious contender for very significant grants. This kind of
relationship, more than a chat with someone’s brother in law, will
ultimately be your “in.”
Myth: Grants are too inconsistent to deserve the attention of fundraising staff
Reality: Grants are consistently useful for certain projects and needs
It is true that foundation grants make up a relatively small percentage
of overall giving in the United States. In 1998, they accounted for
slightly less than 10% of all gifts to charity, according to the
American Association of Fund Raising Counsel. (In contrast, individual
donations accounted for 77%.)
In addition to grants being a small piece of the pie, there are a few
disadvantages to relying on them. For example, if you are balancing
your organization’s livelihood on one big grant, your organization
could fail if that grant gets used up or withdrawn. Having a large
grant early in its life cycle can catapult an organization through all
the difficulties of a slow grassroots start-up, but it can just as
easily lead an organization to delude itself about the kind of
fundraising it needs to do. Several times, we have been contacted by
organizations that were founded with a single large grant, asking us to
seek new grants just as their founding money was about to run out. In
one case there was less than six months before their entire bank
account would be emptied, but their experience led them to believe that
a foundation would swoop in from out of state and pay for everything,
including the heating bill.
It is difficult to bear bad news, but you will find that one of your
most important jobs as a grant seeker is to educate people about the
reality of grants — how long they take to get, what they’re good for,
and how they should fit in with other kinds of fundraising. Large
grants, especially from national funders, can take over a year to
prepare and receive. Given current foundation giving patterns and
initiatives, there are fewer and fewer national foundations even
accepting unsolicited proposals, and there are many things they simply
won’t pay for.
Under current foundation practices, grants are most often given to:
start up new projects; make major expansions to existing projects;
replicate successful projects in new locations; meet one-time capital
or program needs; build an organization’s internal capacity to carry
out its mission; and fund innovative community-wide initiatives and
partnerships that join several nonprofit organizations or sectors.
This means there are important areas of need at your organization that
will not, under normal circumstances, ever be paid for by a grant.
These may include administrative staffing, maintenance of buildings,
insurance on your events or your volunteers, and ongoing expenses for a
successful program that is not changing, expanding, or spinning off in
any way. In addition, foundations rarely fund conferences,
publications, or programs that benefit only a few individuals. Applying
for grants for these items on their own, without their being an
integral part of a larger project that fits current foundation giving
guidelines, will nearly always be a waste of time.
With a few exceptions (such as “small grant” or “mini-grant” programs),
foundations do not want to be the sole funder of a program or project.
They prefer to see you seeking a base of support that includes a range
of sources, from other foundations to individuals.
Similarly, funders do not want your organization to become overly
reliant on them over the long term, and they tend not to make
commitments beyond some two or three year grants. In fact, many will
not even consider a grant request that goes beyond one year. Each grant
you receive will likely be made for something temporary — a new
beginning, significant expansion, new building or van, renovated roof,
or one-time special project. (This is another reason why we advocate a
regular grant seeking effort, to ensure that when you do have new
projects and specific needs, you have a system to bring them in front
of your foundation donors, asking them to “re-up” their giving by
focusing on something new.)
Even when your organization is a good candidate for grants, they can rarely, if ever, be all the funding you need.
In many established organizations, grants are less than 10% of their
total income, excluding years when they have special campaigns, such as
capital building projects. For many organizations, having a large
number of individual donors is especially important. Individual
donations tend to be unrestricted (you can use them for whatever you
deem your highest priority) and the process of getting an individual
donation can be relatively quick — a phone call or a letter. We’ve
assisted in a few phone bank efforts for struggling arts organizations
and have been impressed with their effectiveness, as thousands of
dollars were raised by a small team of volunteers in just a few hours.
In contrast, a grant can take six to twelve months to come in after a
proposal is mailed. So you won’t want to seek grants for an emergency
need or program that is slated to start in one month.
So what is the point of spending time on grant seeking? Even given
their limitations, grants can be a significant source of revenue for
your nonprofit. There are most likely several projects or outstanding
needs at your organization that do fit foundation giving patterns and
for which you need substantial funding. Your strategy will be to focus
on these — recommending that other needs be supported by other kinds of
fundraising.
Myth: Grants are few, huge, and national
Reality: Grants are most often small, numerous, and local
Media coverage of grants might lead anyone to believe that grants are
few and far between, but that when they happen they are tremendous. So
if grants are gigantic pieces of money that are given by well-known
foundations, and that only touch your community once in a blue moon,
why would you want to launch an organized, year-round grant seeking
effort?
The reality is that for most organizations, grants are medium-sized
gifts that come from the same local and regional foundations every
year. When we started grant writing, we were surprised and excited to
learn that there were more than 280 foundations — unsung family and
corporate foundations as well as major philanthropic institutions — in
our home state of Oregon.3 It turned out that we could conduct an
entire grant seeking effort, appropriate for a regional nonprofit,
without once thinking of applying to the Rockefeller, Carnegie, or Pew
organizations. After a few years, we began to identify times when it
was appropriate to approach national funders, but they were never our
primary focus as grant seekers for small nonprofits with local programs
and budgets under $1 million.
We have found it useful to divide grant opportunities into two general
types: bread-and-butter grants, which are recurring (often annual)
opportunities, usually from local or regional sources; and
icing-on-the-cake grants, which are large, often one-time opportunities.
Most nonprofits are small or medium-sized organizations that operate
local or regional programs. There are likely to be an abundance of
bread-and-butter local and regional funders available to them, and with
rare exceptions this is where they should concentrate their grant
seeking. Similar to the effect of expanding the list of individual
donors, this approach moves your organization toward a broader base of
funding; if one or two funders are lost, your organization will still
have many others, and you won’t be scrambling to raise money when your
one big grant runs out. Bread-and-butter grants also provide an
opportunity to increase grant income year after year. As long as your
proposals are well thought-out, you may be able to apply to the same
local foundations year after year with different projects and requests.
This way, you slowly build relationships of collaboration and trust.
Icing-on-the-cake super-grants should be approached only occasionally,
when you fit the guidelines and the opportunity seems very strong. For
example, a major computer company might send out a special Request For
Proposals, announcing the giveaway of millions of dollars in equipment
for organizations exactly like yours and in your geographic area. Or
you might have a truly innovative project that deserves the attention
of a foundation with a national scope and mandate. If your request fits
the guidelines and your program has elements which make it stand out
among the hundreds of proposals that are received each week at a
typical national foundation, you may rise to the top and be given
serious consideration. You may be asked for a site visit, and might
even ultimately receive a grant. But this scenario is very rare for a
local or regional program.
Myth: Taking grant funding means “selling out” your program
Reality: You control your programs, and you can select donors that fit with your mission.
As we mentioned, the ill-prepared or episodic grant seeker may struggle
to create a program that fits the guidelines of a specific funder when
a big grant opportunity arises. Or an organization might approach grant
seeking only when it’s financially desperate and willing to take any
and all suggestions from funders, hoping that if they comply they’ll
get funded. It’s not surprising that anyone who goes about grant
seeking this way, or has seen others do so, might believe a nonprofit
has to sell its soul or corrupt its mission to accept foundation
funding.
It is not necessary to work that way. If you conduct a steady,
year-round grant seeking effort, you gain control over the process. You
select who you will approach as a potential funder, based on any
criteria you wish, and you select how much funding you’ll ask them for,
and when. Since you don’t wait until you’re financially desperate, you
start from a position of more power, able to decide whether a funding
opportunity is worth any requirements it may come with. Proceeding with
integrity, you protect your identity and ideals. You also come across
as a more stable organization, ready and able to handle grant funding.
When you do receive grants from the funders you have chosen to work
with — and for programs that make sense given your mission and goals –
you may find you have little to worry about regarding “selling out.”
What we’ve found is that foundations most often require little more
than a good, solid program. They don’t often ask for (or sometimes even
desire) broad recognition of their grants, unless they are affiliated
with corporations. Local or regional foundations that are smaller than
the Pews and Gateses usually leave program evaluation up to the grant
seeker, asking that you report to them once per year using your own
criteria for program success.
The key to maintaining the integrity of your programs lies in your
choices about who you apply to and how you work. If you seek grants and
other funding consistently, you won’t need to twist and turn your
organization just to get money.
What to expect from grant seeking, and this book
Now that you’ve dispensed with some of the most pernicious myths about
grant seeking, you are ready to jump start an effective grant seeking
effort. To get started and get grants, you don’t need to stay up all
night and write like a nonprofit Shakespeare. You don’t need to
introduce yourself to the entire civic elite of your town. What you
need is not fortitude, connections, or eloquence — it’s a system. Along
with a new attitude about grant seeking, a system will carry you
through months and years of productive grant seeking. This book will
show you one system that works. Think of it as a road map for your next
few months. Its exercises and worksheets will point you on your way.
Don’t be surprised if you feel frustrated at first. Like most skills,
effective grant-seeking has a learning curve, and there are not many
substitutes for putting in time reading and writing. You can expect to
make a considerable investment of your time in research, and in filing,
before you ever write a single word of a grant proposal. (This is why
it isn’t worth it to apply for just one grant!)
Fortunately, our philosophy is about minimizing work through
consistency and simplicity. Stick with us, and you will only have to do
many of these activities once. Other tasks are repetitive, but will
become easier and faster as time goes on. By the end of the book,
you’ll have more than a few grant proposals out in the mail. You’ll
have your own complete grant seeking system, to speed and enhance all
your future work.
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