INTRODUCTION: WHAT THEY DON'T TELL YOU IN GRANTSMANSHIP WORKSHOPS

If you're involved in a nonprofit organization today, one of your greatest concerns is probably maintaining your solvency. Whether you're the CEO of a struggling social service agency, a trustee of a community hospital trying to cope with changing reimbursement patterns, a rocket scientist seeking research money, an orchestra administrator awash in red ink, or a college president looking for ways to maintain enrollment, you know that survival can't be taken for granted. Sometimes it feels like you're fighting a war, with no end in sight.

How do you fight the “red menace” of deficit operation that threatens so many nonprofits? You can reduce expenses, if you can do so without compromising the quality of your services. Or you can generate more earned income.

Another possibility is to find more philanthropic support. Unfortunately, as we all know, fundraising is a highly competitive arena; in some ways, it really is a jungle out there. When it comes to philanthropy, most people involved with nonprofits think of direct mail, benefit events, and annual fundraising campaigns. Grants are also a way of improving an organization's financial situation, but seeking them is a very different process from mounting an annual fund appeal.

Most fundraising campaigns are organized like traditional military operations, with generals mapping out strategy and troops accepting assignments, making phone calls, and visiting prospects. Grantseeking, on the other hand, is more like guerrilla warfare. You operate alone, or with a small band of colleagues, largely on an ad hoc basis. You look for opportunities, calculate the odds of success, and marshal your resources in order to offset your inherent weakness in the situation.

Many view grantseeking as a numbers game: they figure if they send out enough proposals, some are bound to get funded. But unlike the lottery or the slot machine, winning grants is not really a matter of the odds. Some grant applicants—admittedly a small minority—consistently win. The purpose of this book is to explain how they do it. As we will see, the difference between winning grantseekers and losing grantseekers is how each perceives the grantseeking process and how they behave based on those perceptions.

The Relationship Model

I call the set of activities that leads to success the relationship model of grantseeking—and twenty years of experience tells me that those who follow it can expect to win about 90 percent of the time.

The secret (which is really no secret) is to concentrate on establishing and maintaining good relationships with grantmakers. The grantseeking approach taken by those who succeed and that taken by the vast majority who fail differs significantly in two ways.

First, the winners tend to perceive the grantseeking process as highly personal, as any process based on relationships naturally must be. Though people with little experience may think that winning a grant should be impersonal—that grantmakers should be persuaded solely on a proposal's merit and attention to detail—most successful grantseekers know otherwise. They have observed that grant awards follow more from ongoing dialogue between grantseeker and grantmaker than from proposals. Perhaps the most revolutionary message of this book is that proposals in and of themselves don't matter—except insofar as they document the agreement between grantmaker and grantseeker. Not that proposals containing weak or sloppily described ideas get funded very often, but the number of good ideas and beautifully written proposals is so many times greater than the number of grants available that strong ideas and good proposals are necessary but not sufficient to secure grant support.

Second, winners view the grantseeking process as continuous rather than as a series of largely disconnected events. Thus they work on their relationships with grantmakers continuously, keeping up a dialogue and regularly communicating about many issues—grant support being only one. Although there may be periods of intense activity followed by quieter intervals, the grantseeking process is ongoing, as in any other successful relationship.

Who Will Benefit from This Book?

Most people are intimidated by what they've heard about or experienced in grantseeking. If you have ever tried it, the effort probably went something like this:

A phone call or piece of mail alerted you to a new funding opportunity, setting off several intense days or weeks of proposal preparation to meet the deadline. Though you managed to complete the work on time and sent off your proposal to the indicated office building downtown, agency in the state capital, or mail drop in Washington, you might as well have thrown it down a bottomless pit, for all you hear back. So you waited. Finally, a brief letter of rejection arrived, but it gave no meaningful reason why you were turned down.

If you have had this experience, or if you are afraid you will, this book is for you. You have lots of company. Most grantseekers—80 to 95 percent of all applicants—are declined, even if their project is based on an excellent idea and the proposal is on time, well written, and cogently argued. The problem, in short, is not with the project or the proposal but rather with the approach to grantseeking. This book is also for those professionals and volunteers who have had some success in getting grants but want to deploy their resources more effectively and improve their rate of success.

Because so many people are new to fundraising and so few have become proficient in grantsmanship, I assume the reader of this book has no prior knowledge of the process. So please bear with me if, once in a while, a point seems obvious or self-evident. Quite often, a principle that “goes without saying” is precisely the one that actually needs to be emphasized; even experienced people can lose sight of the fundamentals from time to time.

Throughout the book, I use detailed examples from my own experience to show you how my relationship model plays out in real-life situations. Most of these stories involve organizations I have served as an independent fundraising consultant. Though these organizations happen to be based in Cleveland, Ohio, a community that has always been a leader and innovator in the world of philanthropy, they could as readily have taken place anywhere else. Despite regional variations in grantmaking, the principles and methods advocated here are based on universal aspects of human nature and may be used effectively anywhere American philanthropy is practiced.

Skills You Will Acquire

This book will equip you to identify and exploit promising grantseeking opportunities. I hope it will also give you the wisdom—if not the courage—to refuse to waste time on opportunities that hold little real promise.

The objective is to help you get better results by using guerrilla strategies—picking your spots, sizing up your chances, and bringing the proper resources to bear at the proper time and in the proper way. You will learn guidelines that have been developed through experience, using common sense and basic marketing strategies.

You will be able to adopt successful strategies without having to master any new jargon, high-tech equipment, or complicated procedures. And you will be able to do all this with only a handful of colleagues or coworkers—if not by yourself.

In the following chapters, we will look first at some of the fundamentals of grantseeking. Among other things, you will learn:

• Why it's best to view grantmakers as prospective customers
• Various ways of gaining access to grantmakers
• Basic scenarios involving grantseekers and grantmakers that vary according to the type of support you are seeking
• How to tell when a seeming opportunity is actually worth pursuing
• How to identify prospective partners in the grantseeking enterprise
• What kinds of information to have at your fingertips before initiating contact with grantmakers
• The grantseeking process in chronological order, from the first phone call until the grant is made, including these skills:
  • Writing effective letters, concept papers, and white papers
  • Planning, orchestrating, and conducting in-person meetings with grantmakers, from get-acquainted sessions to site visits
  • Communicating both explicit and implicit winning messages to grantmakers
  • Preparing winning proposals (even though these play only a supporting role in the process)
• How to orchestrate advocacy efforts after your proposal is submitted

Grantsmanship, of course, represents only a small part of the fundraising universe. Every organization should have a good annual giving program, which may include direct mail, telemarketing, and special events. Periodic capital or endowment campaigns are also important, and major gifts and planned giving provide for the long-term future of most organizations.

Frequently, however, some of the largest gifts to an organization come from grants, whether you happen to be in a campaign mode or not. As we will see, grantsmanship is frequently the best way to secure the “venture capital” required to launch a new organization or a new program. Grants can even be used to challenge other donors in an annual fund campaign. All the basic principles and techniques of successful grantsmanship have applications to other modes of fundraising.

Once you understand and accept the basic dynamics of the funding relationship and have mastered the skills necessary to carry out the various tasks, you will not only survive the grantseeking process, you will thrive. Your investment of time, energy, and resources will pay significant dividends in the advancement of your organization's work.