[Dalya’s Note: This guest post was written by Diane H. Leonard, GPC. She a certified grant professional who has provided grant development counsel to nonprofit organizations of varying size and scope for more than a decade. ]
As grant professionals and fundraisers we are always working to improve our success ratio, write a stronger application, and build better relationships with our funders. While keeping you attention on best practices when completing your grant applications, it is still possible to overlook some small, yet common and easy-to-address mistakes.
I facilitated a panel at the Grant Professional Association’s conference in Baltimore last year with an experienced group of extremely successful grant professionals who discussed some such mistakes that they had made during their career. The panel I assembled was a dynamic group of grant professionals with a wide range of experience and expertise that I admire tremendously and appreciate using as a sounding board on formal and informal collaborative projects: Rena Beyer of Grant Specialist USA, Margit Brazda Poirier of Grants 4 Good, Linda Butler of Butler Consulting, Jana Jane Hexter of Grants Champion, Jo Miller of JM Grants, and Heather Stombaugh of Just Write Solutions. As a result of this engaging panel dialogue, I have outlined a summary of the remedies to key mistakes we identified for you to focus on avoiding in your grant application documents or grant application submission process.
While not a complete list of steps to take to avoid common mistakes, we agreed in our discussion that they were the most important to ensure are addressed during each application:
