No matter what you want to raise money for, there’s probably a funder out there interested in making a grant for it. When you begin your research into your potential funders, you’ll need to keep in mind the broad categories funders use to describe the kind of support they will give.

By far the most common type of grant is made to support a particular project, as opposed to operating, capital, and challenge grants, which I describe in the following sections. Fortunately, a clever grant writer can make almost any need into a project.

Sometimes the difference between a project and a capital grant lies in how you say it. A small capital project can easily be pitched as a project. Avoid using the word capital in the proposal if the funder doesn’t fund capital projects. Emphasize the short-term rather than the long-term benefits of the project.

Funders like projects because projects have a defined beginning and end. This makes it easy to judge if a project has been successful. Funders are wary of a charity coming back again and again expecting support for the same thing. Although renewal grants are fairly common, the funder will almost always make it clear in your grant letter that their grant does not imply any promise of future funding.

Here are some samples that show the wide range of project grants (also called program grants) I have been successful with over the years:

$10,000 received from a community foundation to provide after-school arts programming to children in a homeless shelter. The grant paid for a writer and a musician to work with the kids, transportation from the homeless shelter in which they lived to the after-school facility, and materials for use in the program.

$25,000 received from a corporate foundation toward the purchase of new computer equipment. The remaining $40,000 for this project was raised mostly from members of the organization’s board of directors. The grant paid for hardware, software, and consultants to do the installation. Note that some foundations will pay for software but not hardware and vice versa. We fortunately found one that did not make a distinction.

$50,000 received from a corporate foundation to expand an internship program over a two-year period. With unemployment at record levels, the corporation was interested in helping people change careers by gaining experience in areas for which their skills were transferable but in which they lacked experience. The grant paid for modest stipends to the interns and for mini-seminars to further develop skills needed in a nonprofit arts organization.

$75,000 received to design a new website and announce it to the public. The grant covered the fees of the web designers and programmers and advertisements to announce the new site, as well as paid for some of the time of regular staff who worked on it.

$100,000 received for a museum to carry out a pilot program to remain open an additional evening each week and a publicity campaign to let the public know about the new hours. Funders love pilot programs—that is, programs that can be continued or used as an example for similar programs elsewhere. The grant paid for placement of newspaper ads and partly subsidized the cost of remaining open. This grant was one of several for this program. In this case it really paid off: 15 years later, the museum is still open and free to the public on Friday evenings.

$170,000 received to provide information services. This grant covered staff salaries to do research to maintain a database of opportunities for artists and to provide personal assistance by phone and e-mail. The grant also covered office expenses incurred by these staff members.

$250,000 received to increase the circulation of a magazine for writers that provides career advice and listings of opportunities. The grant paid for a large direct-mail campaign that would allow testing different approaches and using different designs to see which would be the most successful in attracting new subscribers. This was attractive to funders because it served a dual purpose: it increased the number of writers who were served by the publication, and it increased the earned income for the organization, thus making it less dependent on grants in the future.

The most valuable grant you can receive is for general operating support (known popularly in the business as GOS). You can use this support for basically anything and everything your organization needs to function, including programs, staff salaries (including administrators and fundraisers who are not covered by project grants), rent, utilities, and office supplies.

Because every funder has these same kinds of expenses, you would think they would see the need to make grants to cover them, but that isn’t the case. Consequently, when you find a GOS funder, treasure them, cultivate them, and appreciate them every day.

Funders that provide GOS understand what you do and appreciate its intrinsic value to those you serve. In the best of all possible worlds, these funders will support you over a period of years. But never take your GOS funders for granted. All of them will eventually move on to help other groups.

Many GOS grants will be quite small (as little as $1,000), requiring you to find many of them to pay the basic expenses. This is not necessarily a bad thing—it’s easier to replace two $1,000 funders than to replace one $10,000 funder. Spend some time every month looking for new GOS supporters.

Grants to help pay for a new building are the typical capital grant, which is why capital grants are also referred to as bricks-and-mortar grants. Capital grants, like capital expenses, cover a wider range of needs. Fewer funders make capital grants than make project grants. There are, however, a few major funders that only make capital grants.

Capital expenses are usually defined as those that pay for something that will serve the charity over a period of time, from the 50- to 100-year life of a building to three years for computer equipment. Renovations of an existing space and major purchases such as buses or automobiles are also typical capital grant opportunities.

In the previous list of successful grant proposals, you’ll remember a project grant for computer equipment. This could have been considered a capital grant, but the scale of the project (less than $100,000 at an organization with a $12 million budget) made it more of a project. “Scale” will depend on your organization’s budget and the relative size of the project.

Capital projects are also funded by program-related investments (PRIs). These are usually loans at below-market rates (sometimes at 0 percent interest). In other cases, PRIs will be made to a nonprofit to develop a program that will create earned income through sale of a service or product. Rather than simply repaying the loans, the nonprofit might pay a percentage of the profits to the foundation, just as a for-profit corporation pays dividends to stockholders. Only a small percent of foundations make PRIs.

There’s a natural attraction to helping bring about something as tangible as a building. The funder and the entire community will actually see what you’ve accomplished. Never underestimate the value of naming something—anything—for a donor. You don’t have to put up a building to cash in on naming opportunities. You can name the coffee machine or new television for the recreation room. Although a number of donors shy away from naming, others respond well to the extra motivation.

Capital grants can also be used to build an endowment to support a particular program or your operations. Some foundations specialize in making endowment grants, which are frequently in the form of challenge grants.

Funders in general do not like to be the only ones supporting anything, whether it’s a project or capital expenditure. A challenge grant allows a funder to ensure you pursue a broad base of support. The funder provides only partial support for your project and challenges you to find the other funds by withholding the payment of their grant until you prove to them that you have raised other money.

Some funders particularly like to be part of challenges, either as the one making the challenge or by helping to match or fulfill the challenge. A challenge grant can also be a means of encouraging your regular individual contributors (especially board members) to make additional gifts.

Typically, a challenge grant requires you to raise a proportionate amount of money, either matching the challenge grant equally (a one-to-one match) or greater (a two-to-one or even three-to-one match). With a three-to-one match, the challenger promises to give you, for example, $25,000 if you raise an additional $75,000.

The $25,000 grant for computer equipment mentioned earlier was an interesting match—the grant was conditional on our raising the “additional funds to complete the project.” This created a wide-open matching situation because we could “make the match” by finding cheaper equipment as well as by raising additional funds, which is exactly how it worked out.

Large capital projects commonly include challenge grants to stimulate both additional giving from current contributors, as well as your resolve to find a number of new ones.

When accepting a challenge grant, be sure you understand all the implications of the challenge, including how many dollars you must raise for the match, the time period you have to raise it, and from whom you must raise the money. The last condition might seem strange. After all, money is money. But if a funder thinks you have too few donors to support your new building, for example, they might require that funds come from new donors. Challenge grants help you raise more money, even though all the conditions can sometimes make them seem more trouble than they’re worth.