Chapter 3

Arming Yourself with the Knowledge of What Funders Want

In This Chapter

Communicating with funders effectively by telling your story

Including the right supporting documents

Most private and public sector funding sources all have funding-request guidelines for your perusal on the Internet. I urge you to use these guidelines — they’re the golden key to opening doors for funding consideration. In this chapter, I help you understand grant-related terms and guide you through how to tell and sell your story to potential funders. (Think of this chapter as a warm-up to the heavy lifting you do when you write your proposal. More about that in Part IV.)

Giving Funders the Critical Details They Expect

Potential funding sources for your well-deserved grant award have been trying hard to help grant seekers, including you, understand what they want to read in an award-winning grant proposal. Although the funders’ guidelines may vary in how they order the requested information or word the headings/subheadings, in the end they all want to see commonly organized, written presentations of information.

Shift your focus from the excitement of finding grant-funding opportunities for your organization to gearing up to write the following blocks of information:

• Factual information about your organization and its qualifications
• Compelling information about the specific project for which you’re seeking funding
• Planning-savvy narrative about what you intend to do with the money if you receive it

As you read through each section of the funder’s guidelines, make sure you understand how the funder defines its terms. You need to consider whether you can interpret what it’s asking for in more than one way in order to avoid accidentally giving the wrong info.

What do you do if you don’t understand what the funder really wants? Make a call or send an e-mail, of course. When in doubt, ask! When confused, ask!

In the following sections, I review the basic facts you’re required to provide on most grant applications. I also give you an overview of the project details funders expect you to provide, and I offer suggestions on how to wow the application reviewers.

Providing facts about your organization

Any funding source you approach will have questions about the grant applicant organization’s legal name and structure, such as nonprofit, unit of government (village, town, township, city, county, or state government agency), association, or membership-based organization. Although the wording may vary slightly from one application to another, the cover documents (if applicable) and narratives of grant applications generally ask for the same basic information. Understanding exactly what the application is asking for and knowing how to reply in the right language is critical.

Don’t hesitate to call the funding source for assistance if you have questions about any portion of the application. Asking a funder for help won’t hurt your chances of getting a grant. In fact, doing so may even help because you’re filling out forms in the best possible way.

If you’re trying to enter your responses into an online electronic (e-grant) application, pay special attention to any word, character, or space limitations and stay within those limits.

The basic applicant information requested by all funders includes the following:

• Legal name of the grant applicant: Be sure to list your organization’s legal name here. For charitable organizations, associations, and foundations, the legal name is the one that appears on the organization’s IRS 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6) letter of nonprofit determination. (If you’re not sure, 501(c)(3) is the charitable designation, and 501(c)(6) is the association or membership designation.) For cities, townships, villages, county units of government, and public schools, which have a different classification of nonprofit status, the legal name is the incorporated name.
• Type of grant applicant: Check the box that best describes your organization’s forming structure. For example, you can choose from state agency, county, municipal, township, interstate, intermunicipal, special district, independent school district, public college or university, Native American tribe, nonprofit, individual, private, profit-making organization, and other (which you have to specify).

  Is your organization a type of applicant that isn’t eligible? Search for a partner (government agency or nonprofit) that can be the lead grant application responder. Doing so gets dollars into the front door of your organization because you’re incorporated into the funding request as a subcontracting partner.

• Year the grant applicant organization was founded: Enter the year your organization was incorporated or created. Often, the year of incorporation differs from the creation date because many nonprofit founders start providing programs and services first and seek incorporation several years later. You need to explain any such discrepancy in your opening narrative, which is the background/history narrative section. (See the later “Bringing the facts to life through storytelling” section for more on that piece of the narrative.)
• Current grant applicant operating budget: Supply the organization’s 12-month operating budget total for the current fiscal year. Note that some funders also request the operating budget for the time period that the grant would cover. Always comply with whatever information is requested.

  When it comes to money, be sure to supply information that portrays the truth and nothing but the truth.

• Grant applicant organization’s employer identification number (EIN) or taxpayer identification number (TIN): This portion of the form asks for the seven-digit EIN/TIN assigned to your organization by the IRS. The EIN/TIN is also called a taxpayer reporting number. You can find the EIN/TIN on your IRS letter of nonprofit determination or by calling your organization’s financial person/department.
• Grant applicant organization’s fiscal year: Indicate the 12-month time frame that your organization considers to be its operating, or fiscal, year. The fiscal year is defined by the organization’s bylaws and can correspond with the calendar year or some other period, such as July 1 to June 30.
• Grant applicant organization’s contact person information: Name the primary contact in your organization for grant or cooperative agreement negotiations, questions, and written correspondence. This person should be your executive director, board of directors’ president, or program director — not the grant writer. Why? Because you, the grant writer, have no legal or financial authority to act as the contact person. Communications clearly need to be with the governing body or the authorized executive-level staff.
• Grant applicant organization’s address: Provide the current street and/or mailing address for the applicant organization.

  Potential funders view a post office box address as a red flag because these addresses tend to be used by grassroots nonprofits and fly-by-night (here today, gone tomorrow) grant applicants. Stick with a street address on your grant application.

• Grant applicant organization’s telephone/fax/e-mail information: List the contact person’s telephone and fax numbers (with area code) as well as an e-mail address.
• Grant applicant organization’s website address: Organizations seeking grant funds are wise to have a website that funders can refer to that includes an overview of the organization.

If you’re applying to a federal funder, you also need to provide the following information:

• D-U-N-S number: Federal grant-making agencies require that all grant applicants have a D-U-N-S number that lets others more easily recognize and learn about their organizations. The D-U-N-S number is a nine-digit identification sequence that provides a unique identifier of a single business entity while linking corporate family structures together. You can register for a unique D-U-N-S number by visiting the Dun & Bradstreet website (fedgov.dnb.com/webform) and following the on-screen instructions.
• Grant applicant’s congressional districts: On a federal grant application, you need to list all the congressional districts in which your organization is located and your grant-funded services will be implemented. You can get this information by calling the public library or surfing the Internet to locate your legislator’s website, which will contain his or her district numbers.

  Knowing and developing ties with representatives in Washington, DC and at your state capital is critical. You always need friends in high places. (See Chapter 4 for more on connecting to government officials.)

Writing about the project in need of funding

Filling in all the blanks on paper or electronic grant application and cooperative agreement cover forms and budget forms is critical. Leaving any field related to applicant agency and project details blank makes you look nonresponsive, and this impression alone may stop a reviewer from reading your document any further.

Luckily, most electronic grants and letters of inquiry are programmed to alert you to missing information and won’t let you upload the document until you supply the missing information. Just in case, though, I use the following sections to highlight the blanks you must pay particular attention to so the reviewer doesn’t lose interest in your organization.

Project name

List your project name on the cover letter, the cover form, and any other funder-requested documents. A project name enhances the storytelling (personalized) approach necessary in today’s highly competitive grant-seeking arena.

Project names should be memorable, but stay away from long names. Here’s a great example for a project name: Project MAGNETT. What does it stand for? Mothers And Grandmothers in Need of Emerging Technology Training. And that’s just one possibility. Whatever you do, use your imagination and don’t use a name that translates into an offensive abbreviation or acronym.

Organization mission

When funders ask for the grant applicant organization’s mission statement, they want to see the vision-driving string of words that communicates to the world your organization’s purpose. Be sure to limit your mission statement to a single sentence or a very brief paragraph.

Purpose of the request

Compose a short, one-sentence statement about why you’re approaching this particular funding source. Does its mission align with your organization’s? Has it funded your organization previously? For example, “The purpose of this request is to seek your ongoing funding support for Project MAGNETT — Mothers And Grandmothers in Need of Emerging Technology Training.”

Give dates for the project

Provide the proposed starting and ending dates of the project. You don’t have to figure exact days; just express the project dates according to month and year. Don’t forget to give the project a start date that’s at least six months into the future; funders need time to review and make decisions about who receives grant awards. Many funders specify when (month/year) they anticipate announcing awards. If a time frame is specified in the application materials, target your start date to correspond with it.

Amount requested

Enter the exact amount you’re requesting from the funder (round off to the nearest dollar). Tip: Do your homework by reading the funder’s instructions — they usually contain a funding range or maximum grant award amount number. For example, “The Magic County Community Action Program is seeking $10,000 for Project MAGNETT.”

Total project cost

Include the total cost of the proposed project. Double- and triple-check to make sure the number you enter here matches the total cost of the project listed in the budget narrative and on the budget forms. (For more about budgets, check out Chapter 17.) For example, “The total project cost is $10,000.”

Geographic area served

Describe the location of your project in this order: city, county, state. You can even narrow your target population area down to census tract numbers, specific names of neighborhoods, or congressional districts. (Some funding is designated for specific geographic regions within a state.) For example, “The geographic area to be served includes one county (Magic) which encompasses 34 small townships and includes the following census tracts . . . .”

Signatures

Practically all federal government applications are submitted online now through one of the feds’ e-grant portals, www.grants.gov, so you type the requested contact information for the authorized contact person for your organization into a signature field box instead of submitting an original signature. Even foundations and corporations are using typed names for e-grant signature boxes.

If you end up submitting a paper/hard copy of your grant application, all signatures should be in blue ink. Using this color makes differentiating the original document from the copied documents easy for the funder.

Bringing the facts to life through storytelling

About five years ago, the field of grant writing shifted from technical “just the facts and nothing more” writing to a kinder, friendlier way of cozying up to the grant maker’s decision-making staff. Now, if you want to secure a grant, you must put life, personality, and compassion into your request. This type of writing approach is referred to as storytelling.

Here, I give you some great tips on the type of information to include in each section of your funding request and how to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary in each narrative section you’re likely to see in any funder’s grant application format (I provide more in-depth advice and examples for these narrative sections in Part IV):

• Background/history of the grant applicant organization: Write with passion about your organization: its founding date, its purpose, its mission, and its location. Include quaint, not-so-common information about the founder and his reason for creating a nonprofit organization.

  If you’re writing about a unit of municipal government (city, town, township, village, hamlet, or county subdivision of government), include trivia on how the community was named, started, incorporated, and so forth. Also, include information on any major grant-topic-related accomplishments the grant applicant organization has achieved.

• Current programs and activities: Write with excitement about the current initiatives the grant applicant organization is involved in. List in chronological order all the organization’s programs and activities.

  Include specific program names, dates started, and outcomes-to-date, such as the number of participants who have received services and the benefits they gained because of their involvement in the program.

• Description/demographics of your constituency: Write with accuracy about the population the grant applicant organization provides services to. Include age range, gender, ethnicity, economic status, educational level, and other characteristic descriptors. The funder needs to know whom you serve and what’s special about your target population.

  Include a case scenario, a story about how a participant has encountered multiple life barriers and is now on a waiting list to be served by the grant applicant organization.

• Description of community: Write with innate knowledge about your community’s makeup where the grant applicant organization is located or where its services will be provided. Describe the community by providing a combination of city and county information. This section is about the virtual picture of your community — facts and statistics — not trivia, which belongs in the background section.

  Use compelling words and colorful (but true!) descriptions; funders don’t want to read a book report about your town. Don’t just copy and paste census information from the Internet. Where you do use statistics, incorporate them into tables, graphics, and figures.

  Cite your sources, and don’t use statistics that are more than five years old. Copying and pasting information you find on the Internet is okay as long as you include a reference citation (footnote by copying the website address where you found the information). Just make sure your online sources are reliable.

• Description of work with partnership agencies: Write about the grant applicant organization’s demonstrated partnership experiences with community, regional, state, and national partners. Create a table with header rows for partners and their roles with the grant applicant organization. You can even add a third column to the table for years of affiliation.

  Add shading to the table’s header row and to each column. Just be sure to keep it legible and not distracting.

• Proposed initiative: Write with certainty about what the grant applicant organization plans to do with the grant or cooperative agreement award. State the intentions simply and directly in one or two sentences.

  Write something like “The purpose of this request is to secure the necessary financial infusion to change the lives of 300 or more chronically unemployed individuals who have long given up hope for ever securing gainful employment.”

• Statement of need: Write with compassion about the problem the grant applicant organization will combat with the awarded funds.

  Use gripping words to relay the gloom, doom, drama, and trauma of your situation and why your organization needs the requested funds. Be honest, cite hard data that demonstrates your need, and don’t just use anecdotal observations.

• Program design/plan of action: Write with the knowledge of demonstrated best practices about the process you’ll implement to solve the problem or need. Incorporate evidence-based practices (proven intervention/prevention best practices models, which you can find on the Internet); by doing so, you demonstrate to the funder that you’re relying on proven research to design your program. You let the funder know that you’ve taken steps to avoid reinventing the wheel. (No funder wants to pay for a clueless process of discovery when the intervention process has been perfected elsewhere.)
  • Goals: In futuristic and global terms, create numbered project goals.

    Detail where the target population will be when the grant funds have been expended.

  • SMART objectives: These specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timebound objectives show the funder how you’ll measure the program’s success.

    Write percentage-driven benchmarks for your target population or program that are achievable within the grant period (including annual benchmarks for multiyear requests).

  • Activities/strategies: Write about the proposed activities, tasks, or strategies you’ll implement to reach your goals.

    Put this information into table format and shade each row and column differently (but don’t use too many colors).

  • Timeline: Incorporate target dates for your objectives and activities/strategies. Note when the objectives will happen and when the activities will start and end. A timeline presented in a table looks great to readers. This timeline chart or table is often referred to as a Gantt or implementation chart.

    Shade your rows and columns.

  • Impact on problem: Write about how the grant applicant organization’s proposed action will reduce the problems discussed in the statement of need.

    Note how similar interventions or preventions in other locales demonstrated impact and resolution of the problem(s).

  • Project significance: Write about the impact the grant applicant organization’s project will have on the target population from a wide viewpoint.

    Write this section in italics. When you incorporate italics, you’re speaking more directly to the grant reader/decision maker. Project significance can be stated in a brief paragraph.

  • Systemic change: Write about how the program the grant applicant organization plans to develop with funding support will positively change society or improve rigid and antiquated systems.

    Use futuristic, hopeful language.

  • Performance evaluation plan: Write about who will conduct the performance evaluation, what it will cover, and the time frame for evaluation activities. Keep in mind that the collection of frequent and unbiased feedback from members of the grant’s target population is critical to an accurate performance evaluation.

    Create tables that incorporate the previously written SMART objectives (see the earlier bullet) and how they will be measured.

  • Dissemination of evaluation findings: Write about who will receive a copy of the evaluation findings. Dissemination of evaluation materials is important for reporting to current funders and can sway future funding sources when you attach them to grant applications and cooperative agreements.

    Propose to disseminate findings beyond your local areas. For example, present the findings at a national conference or regional round table where other organizations will benefit from your experiences and results.

• Key personnel/staffing: Write with familiarity about the staff, contracted consultants, and volunteers needed to carry out the program or project. For each position, indicate what percentage of the person’s time will be allocated to the project and which budget — cash match, in-kind, or requested — his salary will come from. (Cash match refers to cash your organization has available to allocate to the grant-funded program, when funded.)

  Format position titles and time allocated to the projects in bold.

• Management plan/organizational structure/administration: Write with confidence about who will report to whom and where the built-in assurances of administrative and financial responsibility will be established. Be sure to add your financial staff to the management plan. Funders want to see that your organization has strong financial accounting and stewardship practices in place.

  Incorporate this information into a table.

• Sustainability: Write with accountability about how the grant applicant organization will continue some or most of the grant-funded program components after the initial grant-funding time frame has ended.

  Tell funders about the funding plan your board of directors and administrative staff or development office staff have in place. Let them know that you’ll be working hard to identify continuation funding for their starting grant investments.

• Adequacy of resources: Write with confirmation about any financial, physical, and personnel resources the grant applicant organization already owns or has access to that can be used for program activities.

  Bullet the resources list.

Submitting Requested Attachments to Your Funding Request

Virtually all grant applications require a few standard attachments that provide additional information about the grant applicant organization. These attachments follow the grant or cooperative agreement narrative. The following list outlines some of the things you’ll likely attach to your grant request. Keep in mind that each funder has its own instructions on how to order these attachments, so the order here isn’t necessarily standard.

Funders are often very specific with regard to attachments. Many accept only the attachments they specifically list. If the funding source’s guidelines indicate that the funder accepts no attachments or that submitting any material besides the grant application results in the application not being reviewed, omit the standard attachments covered in this list:

• Budget summary/cost summary: Fill in the blanks on a standard worksheet listing line items and expense amounts as required by the grant guidelines or directions. (Head to Chapter 17 for more about budgets and financial stuff.)
• Budget detail/budget narrative/cost justification: Write a detailed narrative on each proposed expense.
• Up-to-date financial statement: Attach a copy of the grant applicant organization’s most recent financial statement. Whether audited or unaudited, the financial statement should explain any findings of concern.
• Proof of tax-exempt status (if applicable): Proof is a copy of the grant applicant organization’s 501(c)(3) letter of nonprofit determination from the IRS, with the date on which a certifying agency recognized the status.
• Board of directors with affiliations: This attachment lists the names and board positions of the organization’s governing body along with their position within the community (board of directors, city council members, village trustees, and so on). This document also should mention the lengths of their board terms and amount of time remaining to be served.
• Letters of commitment: A letter of commitment comes from a partner organization and states that the partner is committed to providing leveraging assets to your grant-funded program when funded. Partner organizations can commit to providing cash, facilities, technical assistance, equipment, supplies and materials, or loaned staff. Ask for letters of commitment from affiliates early in the writing process, and include at least three such letters with all grant applications you send out.
• Annual report: Include an annual report (brochure, booklet, or newsletter).
• Other documentation: Submit one-page summaries or complete résumés of key program personnel, as the funding source prefers. Also, if your organization has memorandums of agreement or memorandums of understanding signed by partner or collaborating agencies, attach these documents last. (Go to Chapter 9 for more information on these documents.)