Posts Tagged ‘grants’
Posted by Gayle Gifford on December 1, 2011 in Fundraising
At the AFP Massachusetts 2011 Fundraising Conference on November 30th, Margaret McKenna, former CEO and now senior advisor to the Walmart Foundation, shared some tips for appealing to corporate grant makers that I’d like to pass along to you.
- Use your “heart and instincts.” Think about what would move you to give money, and write accordingly.
- Make your case succinctly right up front. Be very “crisp” right from the start by defining the problem and how you are planning to address it. Show why your organization has the credibility to address this problem. Don’t lead with a boilerplate mission and history.
- “Use bullet points.” Explain the need, why the need is important and how it is not being met, whether anyone else is addressing this, and why the money should go to you.
- In writing about your mission, explain why it is important. Would some other group have to come along to address this if you went away? Would anyone care?
- Show your passion.
- Explain your expertise, the commitment you’ve already demonstrated to this issue, and how it fits in with what you do.
- Explain how many lives will be affected and the impact you seek to have, not just how many people you plan to “touch.”
Good advice for making your case to any donor, don’t you think?
Have any success stories of corporate grant seeking you’d like to share? I’d love to hear them.
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P.S. Of course, if the funder has a specific format they want you to use, remember to follow that.
P.P.S. Formerly the President of Lesley University, Ms. McKenna talked about the lack of understanding about nonprofits she encountered when she moved into the corporate sector. She noted that of the foundation heads of the Fortune 100 companies, only 3% had nonprofit experience. And, that most had spent a good portion of their working lives within the corporation whose foundation they were now leading.
Overall, she felt our sector had a lot of work to do teaching the corporate sector about the nonprofit sector. (I agree. And government too.). Joking, she mentioned that PowerPoint presentations with lots of graphs and charts were very influential tools in corporate culture.
But never just assume lack of knowledge about your issues or the sector… make sure that you know who you are talking to. Remember to do your research on the background of your grants officer.
Related posts:
How we got the grant Part 1
How we got the grant Part 2
You can hear a lot by listening
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on February 10, 2010 in 100 Things We've Learned, Fundraising
In How we got the grant – Part I, I started telling you the story of how one organization overcame a long history of rejections to finally receive a grant from a very desired funder.
To quickly summarize:
The international child sponsorshop and development organization I worked for had tried and failed many times to receive a development education grant from the US Agency for International Development.
We learned that one of the reasons for this was that our donor-to-sponsored child and family communications were not taken seriously by the funder and undercut our credibility.
We initiated a process to explain the theory and practice behind our communications program to USAID. As a result of that, the door opened a crack.
Our first three lessons learned:
- Get involved with your colleagues
- Find out what funders think about you
- You have to have and discuss a theory of change
That’s were I left off. On to the next set of lessons.
So, I now had the task of designing a development education program that would win funding and achieve our desired mission impact.
Lesson Four: Build your new program on your existing assets
Because our experience showed that people-to-people contact helped North Americans care about other parts of the world, we knew our development education program could take advantage of our 50 year history of direct communications. Our office was rich with the stories, photos, drawings and reports from sponsored children, their families, our international staff and town or village leaders. Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on February 3, 2010 in 100 Things We've Learned, Fundraising
Back in the 80s, I was director of development and communications for the US affiliate of an international child sponsorship organization.
Keeping the advertising, invoicing, fundraising, and donor stewardship running was an expensive investment for an organization that relied primarily on monthly giving from tens of thousands of donors.
While that funding model was clearly our strength, it also lost us donors who determined which organization they chose to support solely on the basis of overhead ratios. Overhead costs were lower at colleague agencies that had lots of low-fundraising-cost government grants and commodities passing through their books.
(Note: Why overhead ratios tell only a tiny part of the story).
Which is one reason why we were interested in increasing our revenue from grants (in addition to the good work that we could do with more money.)
In particular, we had our eye on “development education” grants awarded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Those funds supported programs that taught US audiences about global issues, especially issues facing the world’s most poor and vulnerable people.
We also knew that those agencies that received USAID development education grants seemed to have a “more favored” status within the development community than those who didn’t. AID funding was like a seal of approval that our development education would be recognized by our peers.
Yes, we wanted to be in the “in crowd.” Being “in” often led to more media exposure, more opportunity for partnerships with our colleagues, and, ultimately, more donors and more funding to support our programs overseas.
But year after year (before I arrived), our proposals kept getting rejected. And we couldn’t understand why.
And to put the frosting on the cake, we kept hearing funders and our non-sponsorship colleagues advocate for personalizing international development to US citizens by sharing the stories of real people, families and communities overseas.
But but but… each and every day, we were sending very real and personalized stories about those very same communities and families to tens of thousands of donors in the US.
What were we doing wrong?
Lesson One: Get involved with your colleagues
Luckily, my boss was determined to shift the perception of our agency in the eyes of his international colleagues. So he became very active in the US international development community. He joined committees in strategic networks. He lobbied our international program staff to participate in the US as well. He brought onto our Board of Directors individuals with international development expertise and got them involved in those networks as well.
Through those activities, he also got to work with and come to know the staff in the development education division at USAID. And that’s how we learned what was wrong with us.
Lesson Two: Find out what funders think about you.
Without getting into too much detail, suffice it to say that child sponsorship organizations like ours — the ones that invested in active communications between donors here in the US and their sponsored families overseas — were not seen by many of their colleagues as serious international development organizations. Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on August 7, 2008 in Little ideas, Research
Sitting in the file cabinets of most foundations are hundreds of thousands of final reports from grantees on projects funded by those foundations.
For some time I’ve been thinking that it is a shame that all that great learning is locked away, inaccessible from others who might put those lessons to good use.
Call it Open Source grant reporting.
My dream is to see all those reports made available on the web. Imagine that you’re sitting in Iowa and thinking about launching an arts mentoring program for high school students. Wouldn’t it be great if your initial googling would not only surface the names of other nonprofits that run arts mentoring programs for you to call, but also produced links to the dozens of reports reflecting on arts mentoring programming from start up to roll out?
I can picture researchers mining these reports and preparing national “lessons learned” papers that can be shared across the industry. Or program officers skipping right away to implement “what worked” rather than rehashing the same missteps and dead ends.
Kudos to those foundations and others who make their final reports available to their colleagues throughout the US. But why wait for the foundations. What if nonprofits posted their own grant project reports on the web to share with their colleagues?
Insanity you say? Who would want to expose themselves in this way?
Even just having short summaries on the web to tempt us would be a great start. Then we could “call for a copy of the full report.”
What do you think? Doable?
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