Before you put fingers to keyboard on a grant proposal, you must carefully read the funder’s mission statement, guidelines, lists of recent grants made, and program descriptions, which you can find online, in annual reports, or in other publications. Not all this information will be available for every foundation, but use as much as you can gather as your starting point.

Sometimes, the program guidelines a funder makes public are general and of limited use, but even if the funder provides detailed information, you’ll want to go further by checking into recent grants it’s made. Pay more attention to what it does than to what it says it does.

Many foundations’ annual reports simply list the names of the grant recipients and the amount. In its 990-PF forms, this is almost always the case. Although that information will help you, it doesn’t tell the whole story. For example, was the $10,000 grant to the after-school program for teacher training, operating support, or equipment? Unless you know, you’re at a disadvantage when preparing your proposal.

Thankfully, a number of foundations do provide that kind of information. The ones I listed in Chapter 7 as having good websites all give you details about their grants online. Guides to funding in particular areas are worth checking out to see if they provide that level of detail. You can also look for funding credits and donor listings published by the grant recipients to discover the purpose of the grant.

There’s enough to know about and do in preparing a successful grant proposal without following a false lead. By cross-checking funders’ grant lists with reference books and recipients’ listings, you’ll narrow down your prospect list to the few foundations that will truly be good prospects for your charity.