RstephensonJR's blog

There’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears involved in creating a compelling, persuasive and fundable proposal. No wonder nonprofits put a lot of eggs in that basket. At the risk of a ticket from the metaphor police, maybe we need to spend more time caring for the chickens and ensuring that those eggs are well-nourished. A lot of work needs to be done before, and in preparation for, a terrific proposal. These are some of the important elements of the iceberg which lie below the surface.

Seems simple: you prepare and submit a proposal asking for a grant to help support the afterschool program, you get an award letter and a check – then it turns out that you really need the funds to go toward a high school mentoring project that’s run out of money. Well, it’s education, right? Helping kids? Shouldn’t be a big deal?

When it’s time to develop and present a proposal to a potential funder, there are a lot of things a nonprofit might do to improve its chances of a grant. Whatever those positive steps for your organization, here are some negatives—things that are a must to avoid—that apply to most organizations seeking funding.

Good news: the foundation has given you a grant, you’ve spent the money and now it’s time to submit an application for another award. This is an opportunity to create a “new top” for your story—a new headline, a fresh look at the challenges, a record of what’s been done and how that sets you up for what comes next. It’s also a chance to avoid sounding like “here we are again.”

It’s not uncommon: a nonprofit’s program staff or its executive director get excited about funding opportunities and ask the proposal writer or development people “put something together and go after that grant! The XYZ Foundation says it’s interested in what we do, there’s a deadline coming up in a week, so write it up and submit it.”

Anyone who’s ever written a proposal knows this feeling—at some point, you have to start stringing words together and putting them down. What language should you use? What style of writing? To find the appropriate voice for your narrative, consider these suggestions and cautions.

Much has been said about a nonprofit’s need for evaluation and accountability. Donors want to know what their money has produced. Nonprofits need to care a lot about their work AND count the things that tell them the work is producing results. How to balance head and heart?

Here you are, poised and ready to submit a compelling proposal to a very likely foundation prospect. You’ve written a solid narrative, you’ve double-checked the budget and you’ve attached all required documents. Just before you send it—did anybody check your spelling?

By definition, most nonprofits are small (99 percent have fewer than 500 employees) and many are very small (median staff size is four employees). We tend to see a small organization’s work as tied to local or regional circumstances and measure its impact in similar terms. We might be missing the big picture.

It’s a deceptively simple idea, really. The people who actually have an experience are the ones who can best talk about it and reveal its impact. In the worlds of grant-seeking and grant-making, it’s becoming more common for funders to emphasize the “lived experience” of applicants or grantees.