Blog Topics
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Answers to the Most Commonly Asked Questions We Receive about Grants
What Should You Be Doing: Fundraising or Pursuing Grant Money?
Setting Yourself Up to Win a Foundation Grant Before the Funding Opportunity Comes Out
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Using Evaluation Criteria to Prepare a Stronger Grant Proposal
Is It Possible to Submit the Same Proposal to Multiple Funders?
Good, Better, Best: Three Tips for Transforming a Mediocre Grant Proposal into a Great One
The Fastest Way to Prepare a Compliant, Responsive Grant Proposal
How to Increase the Odds that Your Grant Application Will Be Funded
Tips for Creating an Organizational Chart for a Grant Proposal
How to Write a Grant Proposal Part II: What Will You Need to Prepare?
6 Strategies to Make the Grant Proposal Submission Process Less Stressful
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Three Options for Managing References in Grant Proposals and Other Documents
Track the Latest News Related to Nonprofits & Grant Writing without Cluttering Your Inbox
Productivity Tools to Stay On Top of Proposal Management Tasks
The Grant Writer’s Digital Toolkit for Writing, Researching, Creating & Collaborating
Finding Funding for Research
Our blog posts typically focus on grant strategies for nonprofit institutions. In this post, we’re going to focus on a different topic for a more targeted audience. The topic is research funding. The content is most relevant to US-based academics. However, many of the principles also apply to researchers based outside of the US as well as to nonprofits.
How Can You Tell If Your Grant Proposal Is Any Good?
After you finish writing your grant proposal, is there any way to know if it is any good?
We received this question recently, and we imagine others have wondered this as well.
While there’s no way you can determine with 100% certainty that your proposal will be funded, there are several things you can do to make sure your proposal complies with the solicitation guidelines and is as responsive as you can make it. No proposal is perfect. However, if you follow the five strategies outlined below, you should end up with a submission-worthy proposal.
You’ve Submitted Your Proposal—Now What?
After you submit your grant proposal, you may be tired of thinking about it and relieved the process is behind you. And while the process is mostly over, there are a few remaining things to be done between the time you submit the proposal and the time you hear back about its fate. Below are our suggestions for some post-submission activities to finish up the process.
The Rise of Invitation-Only Grant Opportunities
We’ve begun to notice a pattern among foundations. Whether it’s a real trend or a pattern we observed because of the particular funders we’ve been researching recently, we’re not sure.The pattern is this: We’re noticing that foundations increasingly appear to be moving from an open process—where they solicit grant applications through a published funding opportunity announcement (FOA)—to a closed one, where the foundation screens organizations and then invites a select group to apply for funding.If your organization happens to be one of the invited grantees, this trend could be welcomed news because it means your application will face less competition and already has favored status. The invitation-only system does present challenges though, particularly for nonprofits that lack established relationships with the donor community.
When Is It Appropriate to Contact Program Officers
Program officers at foundations can be a valuable resource for nonprofit organizations. Often a short phone conversation with a program officer can quickly resolve any questions you might have related to eligibility, project scope, funding priorities, and application guidelines.
Discover Funding Trends Through a Landscape Analysis
As part of developing your funding strategy, you’re going to want to confirm that the funders you are interested in are reasonable prospects. This is where a funder landscape analysis enters the picture. A landscape analysis involves an in-depth review of a specific group or class of funders to identify funding trends and programmatic priorities.
Simplify Your Knowledge Management System with Slab
What kinds of software solutions do nonprofits need? Pretty much everything for-profit businesses need, including tools for knowledge management.
This brings us to Slab (www.slab.com), which is the focus of this post. Slab is a browser-based knowledge management tool that companies (and nonprofits and educational institutions) can use to create, organize, store, and share information. You can read about several use cases for Slab on Slab’s website. However, since the use cases are oriented more toward companies, we thought it might be helpful to show how Slab could be used in three scenarios commonly encountered in a nonprofit context.
What Do Reviewers Like to See in Grant Proposals?
To prepare a competitive proposal, you need to look at your proposal from the perspective of the reviewers and the evaluation criteria they will be applying. What can you do to make it easier for the reviewers to give your proposal a high score? Applying the rules of good writing (writing clearly and concisely, no jargon) combined with complying with the proposal guidelines will help. Other things you can do include being realistic about what you can accomplish and giving reviewers enough detail so they can understand your proposal, regardless of their area or level of expertise.
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