If my doctor told me I had only six months to live I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.
Q: What is the best way to measure return on investment for grantwriting?
A: You may be tempted to think that it’s simply the amount of money you immediately bring in minus the time and money you spent to procure that grant. Right? Not so fast…
We need to look at grantwriting’s return on investment in both the short term and long term.
The number and size of grants directly resulting from any given proposal is often out of your control. Foundation board members consider many factors when funding different grants, and (I dare say) the quality of your proposal is only one of them. The organization’s reputation or history in the community, changing funder priorities or staff, unexpected limitations on funds, and a perceived mismatch with a proposal’s emphasis are just a few. So the short-term success of any proposal (i.e., getting funded) is not the only way we can measure the effectiveness of grantwriting work.
The good news is that the grantwriting process itself can be valuable to the organization in several ways. For example, thinking through the responses to a Request for Proposals can be a great strategic planning exercise. Creating a program budget may shine a light on expenses you have never tallied up before. While writing a general operations proposal, seeing the big picture of an organization (beyond its day-to-day parts) can be an eye-opening experience. I have seen many organizations benefit in these ways from the grantwriting process (whether or not they get a specific grant). Continue reading
Writing skill is becoming mandatory today…It often makes the difference between a person saying, ‘Yes, I want to buy [orr support] that,’ and ‘No way I’m going to buy [or support] this. I can’t even understand it.’
— Jay Conrad Levinson, author of Guerrilla Marketing
Writing, when properly managed, is but a different name for conversation.
— British writer Laurence Sterne
[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:
