• 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

A few months ago, I ran a training session for the board and staff of a local nonprofit on evaluating outcomes. Because I like the organization and its leadership a whole lot but it isn’t in the inner circle of charities I support with cash donations, I didn’t charge for my services.

A few days later, I received a email notice from the microlending nonprofit Kiva that a gift certificate was given in my name from the board chair. I was touched.

Kiva told me the amount of the gift certificate and that I could use it to make a microloan. Because there was some effort involved, I put the action into my pending basket of not urgent items and promptly forgot to “redeem” the gift certificate.

In a few weeks, Kiva sent me an email reminding me that I hadn’t redeemed my gift certificate. All good. But then the reminder told me that I could 1) redeem my gift certificate (by making a micro loan) or 2) do nothing and the gift would convert to a donation to Kiva.

Because I wasn’t really terribly interested in making a micro-loan and because I know how much nonprofits can use the unrestricted funds, I wanted option 2.

Unfortunately, there was a catch. I had to wait ONE YEAR from the time the gift certificate was purchased until Kiva could convert the gift certificate into a donation.

Well, I thought, I’ll just email Kiva’s customer support and tell them that they didn’t have to wait a year. I’d just donate the gift certificate right now so they could put the money immediately to work.

I promptly got an email back explaining the following to me:

Kiva tries to encourage people to make loans with their gift certificates because if they enjoy the experience and continue to lend, we can have a greater impact on global poverty.  This is why we don’t encourage people to donate their gift certificates, but we do process them as a donation after one year so the money doesn’t get wasted. (Emphasis added)

I wasn’t enjoying the experience any more.

The email was signed with a person’s name (good). I noted the title given:  “Customer Service Volunteer.”

Okay, it’s a volunteer. I’ll give him or her a break. So I wrote back that they really didn’t have to wait a year, that I really did want to have them immediately convert the gift certificate to a donation so they could use it right away.

Instead, I got back the following reply:

If you’d like, I can cancel the gift certificate, and the funds will be immediately returned to the purchaser’s Kiva account.

So, the only options available to me were:

1. I could make a micro-loan, which I wasn’t interested in doing.
2. I could let the money sit “unused” for one year and then they would transfer the funds into their general fund.
3. I could ask that they cancel the gift certificate and return the funds to my colleague.

But what I couldn’t do, under any circumstances, was to have them immediately convert the gift certificate from their microloan category to their general fund category.

HUH?

I’m sure there must be some pretty complicated accounting rules behind this that I’m not understanding. Or at least I hope so. Because otherwise, I’d just call it foolish bureaucracy on their part. Because instead of satisfying the original donor and a potential new one, they now have no new microloan and a potential donor who knows that Kiva would rather let money sit for 11 months than break ” the rules” to accelerate what it eventually will do anyway.

My “favorite” rules

I run into this silliness all the time and I’m sure you do as well. Take the fiscal year end push for donations. I hate to break the news but, as a donor, it really doesn’t motivate me to get my gift in any sooner just because you have an August or October fiscal year deadline. My donations are organized by the calendar (and thus my tax) year and December 31 is the only deadline I really care about. Unless you had some truly compelling deadline for me to respond to.

One of my absolute favorite rules is the one where organizations won’t give membership benefits to a donor who only made a gift through the year end or some other special appeal. Why? Because the donor didn’t formally “renew” their membership — even if the non-membership contribution received was $1,000 and the membership they didn’t get was only $25.  What fabulous membership benefits are they holding back anyway? It’s most likely a crummy newsletter and maybe, just maybe, some small discount on merchandise or programs that I’m unlikely to use. And in this case, trying to keep track of which donors are members and which aren’t is usually a processing pretzel that adds undue administrative hassles.

I know that you’ve heard it before, but please put yourself into your donor’s shoes before you start setting up all of these rules. Or else come up with some more convincing excuses.

Gayle

P.S. I’d love to hear your stories of off-putting rules that you’ve encountered as a donor.

A colleague was sharing ideas from a workshop she attended. The presenter  had described a common situation that many directors of development experience.

You know the one. The development director has just laid out a carefully crafted strategy based on best practices and research. Immediately a board member or other leadership volunteer challenges the elements of the plan.

I’ve found that this scenario is very common when planning events or personal solicitation campaigns.

Usually, the challenge reflects the anxiety of the volunteer at being asked to step outside of his or her comfort zone. The volunteer/board member, fearful of the task ahead, comes up with dozens of reasons why the carefully developed strategy won’t work. Why, another organization he volunteered at just sent out a glossy letter instead of asking him to make phone calls.

So my colleague noted that the workshop presenter made the case that fundraising is a profession. One of the ways to tell a true profession is whether or not it has a body of knowledge that is “unique and specific to its practice and function.” (AFP).  She made the case that fundraising does in fact have an established and growing body of knowledge.

The presenter then described a few scenarios of other professions with established bodies of knowledge where it would be unimaginable to find the amateur telling the professional how to do that job. Here are two that came to mind:

• Could you imagine a board member telling the chief of surgery at a nonprofit hospital a better way to perform an upcoming operation?
• Or a committee chair telling the head coach at an independent school a better way to train his basketball players? (Well, maybe you could imagine that, but you get the picture.)

So why do board members feel they can tell fundraising “professionals” how to do their job?

But here was my counterpoint.

Before we get a little self-righteous about all that profession stuff, maybe we need to look into the mirror.

Perhaps our board members don’t treat us as the professionals we are because we act like amateurs can do our jobs.

Case in point:

Why do development directors and executive directors act like their board members rose from the primordial ooze as trained fundraisers?

I find way too much agony and even anger in this profession at board members about fundraising.  I’ve written about this time and again (see Banishing your expectation of board fundraising). How, if we believe that fund development is a profession, can we expect good-hearted people with no fund development background to spontaneously do our jobs for us?

We can’t both complain that we aren’t respected for the professionals we are and then simultaneously gripe and moan when the amateurs on our boards don’t act like professional fundraisers.

Find the willing, equip them with compelling cases for support, train them, and hold their hands all the way through the process. In essence, put those professional skills to work.

The link took me to a SFGate San Francisco Chronicle story about a serendipitous $1.3 million gift that the online charity DonorsChoose.org received last Tuesday.

In case you don’t know, DonorsChoose.org is an online nonprofit where individual classroom teachers from across the U.S. can list projects that they need funded. The site includes a comprehensive description of the project with a complete budget.  For example, I searched the site for the charter school on whose board I sit and found this request for $903 from a teacher at Blackstone Academy Charter School in Pawtucket, RI. (The request includes an option for a donation to DonorsChoose.org).

To get back to the SFGate story, the CEO of DonorsChoose.org related how he had received a phone call where he was asked how much it would take to fund all the requests from California teachers.  You can read the story for all the details, but it turned out the phone call was from the ED of a local foundation. They ended up sending a check to cover all of the California teacher requests and then some.

This is one of those miracle giving stories that just about every nonprofit longs for… the out-of-the-blue million dollar gift.  The fairy tale dream come true.

But what really impressed me in the story was the ability of two people in particular who reached for the big gift. The first, the really critical one, was the CEO of DonorsChoose.org, who was willing to put the full number out there when asked what it would take to fund all the California teachers requests… “just over $1 million” he said, even thought he thought it would scare the donor away.

Imagine what might have happened if he, like so many volunteers or even nonprofit staff, had hemmed and hawed, trying to second guess the giving level of his donor. He likely would have ended up in the situation where he grossly underestimated the giving ability of his donor and received far less than he needed.

(One small example of this tendency to underask that drives me bonkers is the special event invite. I’ve never understood why anyone would design a special event invitation with the bottom ticket level as the only giving option.  I’ve rarely encountered an event solicitation where no donor was willing to give more than the ticket price when given the option to do so.)

The other courageous ask was mentioned farther down in the story. It turns out that one of the teachers had posted a very bold gift request — $10,000 for a traveling computer lab — much larger that the range of other requests.  And because she was so fearless in her request, she was nicely rewarded with what just what she asked for.

Again these serendipitous gifts don’t come along every day (or maybe they do, but we don’t hear about them very often).

Maybe someday your giving fairy tale will come true. But in the meantime, while you are waiting, don’t be afraid to ask for what you need.

I know that their story is not unique, that each day there are millions, probably billions, of philanthropic acts across the globe.

But what made me smile over my morning tea was the way that Ram described his philanthropy:

“I get so much satisfaction, so much pleasure out of this — I can’t tell you in words. You have to experience this. This is full of life.”

Demonstrating again the principle of “giving till you feel good” that my departed colleague, Herb Kaplan, always espoused.

But the PS grabbed me.  (And yes, I read the PS first. I quickly see that the main message holds bad news for me).

“P.S. Have you heard the Bates parking meter story? It’s two minutes and guaranteed to make you smile…this was sent to alumni (who hadn’t made a Bates Fund gift or pledge) two weeks ago.”

I can’t imagine a parking meter on the leafy Bates quad of my memory, nor even on the surrounding streets of sleepy Lewiston, Maine, so “the parking meter story” monicker raises a question I can’t answer without clicking on the link, a classic teaser trope. Christina promises to answer the question in two minutes or less and amuse me in the process.

I like the quick and indirect way Christina clues me in that this is not just a funny story. She tells me this story was sent to non-contributing alums a couple of weeks ago. That truth-in-advertising builds vital trust and gently reminds me that I’m a delinquent, too. I click on the link.The promised story is delivered without flash in a warm, male voice. The tale is simple.(Spoiler alert!) Because she had a Bates sticker in her car window, a Bates alum is saved from an expiring parking meter by another anonymous alum who leaves a  note about sticking together. That little story is set inside another even tinier story. The narration begins, “The day we dropped our son off at Bates, the Associate Dean of students told us this story…”

In the first nine words, I’m time-traveled back to that quad, then I’m whisked off to Boston where the actual incident takes place (photos of Bates and a parking meter support the scene-setting).

At 45 seconds, the parking meter story ends. The narrator names a few critical values of the Bates education his son is getting, but quickly gets to the core message: Bates is a community that lasts a lifetime. “Batesies take care of each other. And now we need you to take care of Bates.” Professional-quality still images of students in interesting settings back up each new idea.

After a final dollop of urgency (“The Bates Fund ends of June 30th. The meter is running down.”) the narrator directs us to the link where we can give and the video ends. It’s engaging, on-point and efficient with my time. It creates an experience that feels simple and brief, but which uses complex narrative to draw me through it and move me to give. I’ll be imitating this one as soon as I get the chance.

Well done, Christina! And I’ll make good on the pledge if you’ll tell me what it was.

Dear Gayle and Jon,
I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for the Workshop “Getting the Most from your Annual Appeal” that you gave on Oct. 8th for the Land and Water Partnership at the Audubon Society of RI.  I think that our letter was not as good as what you had presented, but it was a big improvement from previous ventures.

But the proof is in the pudding, right?!
So, the bottom line, proof of the pudding is that last year we raised $31,365 through 88 gifts with our single page, tear off and send back approach.

This year, we received 173 gifts for a total of $62,570 for our two page, bulleted, story telling approach to support stewardship with the envelope provided!

So, we are giving you a ’soft’ credit (as they say in our business!) for doubling our gifts!  We are so grateful!

I think Jon got me when he said he knew there were some people who just threw these letters in the trash, but for those who really care and want to know, give them something worth reading.  I know many of our members in the land trust are the latter types, and I appreciate so much that you brought this to my attention.

I truly appreciate a good teacher, and this deserves recognition all its own. Many heartfelt thanks from the South Kingstown Land Trust!

Ever,

Claudia E. Swain
Director of Development
South Kingstown Land Trust

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Claudia, We’re blushing! But how could anyone resist those gorgeous Scottish Highlander cattle!

Thank you so for sharing this with us and letting us share your letter with our readers. You can read the full letter here.

And continued good fundraising for the South Kingstown Land Trust. Local land trusts like yours absolutely prove the Margaret Mead quote:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

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:

1. Get involved with your colleagues
2. Find out what funders think about you
3. 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.Our staff routinely oooed and awed over  some dazzling art and images on 8 1/2 x 11 inch or A4 paper that serendipitously came through our doors en route to sponsors.

What if we did something with art produced by children in our program countries? Let our kids tell their own stories, through their art and through their descriptions of the scenes they were sending.

Oh yes, one more thing. Our development education program wouldn’t be built around an in your face story of poverty or helpless victims. We wanted to share the real stories of daily life, told by real children living those lives.

Lesson Five: Bring something new to your funder’s portfolio

One of the things that we had noticed about the development education projects that had been previously funded was that the majority were aimed at high school or middle school students. After a while, the projects sounded very similar.

We had also learned that USAID staff weren’t interested in continuing to fund projects that seemed to be duplicates … after all, once a high school lesson plan had been created by one organization, couldn’t it be used by others?

We took that to heart. We had this great art and these first hand stories of individual children, their families and their communities. So how could we use the art to reach a new audience? And who would appreciate it the most.

Duh! How about art teachers? Or elementary school kids? No one had developed a program for them yet.

But would it work?

Lesson Six: Consult the experts to ensure strong program design

Because we didn’t have experts on staff who were elementary school educators, curriculum designers, artists or art teachers, we sought out expertise locally and nationally to help us think about the program design and the use of artwork. What we came up with, with their advice, was a development education program for 4 and 6th graders (because that’s were they were studying international issues in our potential pilot schools), multi-disciplinary to fit the elementary school model, and based on the art and stories of children in our program countries.

We knew that we also had to build this expertise into our proposal design, so we included funding for a curriculum consultant who would also be the project manager and funding for an expert on art and teaching. We also added two advisory councils, one to select the art that included art teachers and an artist from Ghana who had recently relocated to our area, and a second teachers advisory group of those who would be interested in piloting the project and helping us test activities.  And of course, a few individual with international development expertise.

Lesson Seven: Build internal support and ownership

Of course, the program wouldn’t work without the buy in of a number of our field directors who had to secure the art work. We also had a few university professor board members who thought the whole idea was foolish because who could teach a subject so complicated as  international development through pretty pictures? (And they doubted our ‘teaching” ability)

We found at least six or seven field directors from different parts of the world who loved the idea and were willing to work with us to get children in their area producing work about our themes: family, school, work, food, fun, home. We offered to cover the cost of any art materials and shipping that they needed as we knew this wasn’t in their budgets. They sent us what turned out to be very modest expenses which we included in the project budget.

We weren’t able to convince our skeptical board members that this approach would work, but we were able to get them not to oppose our seeking out the grant. Whew.

Lesson Eight: A creative presentation sometimes helps

As we were pulling the project together, we needed to call it something. With some brainstorming by my staff and others in our office, my team finally decided on a name for the project that was both intriguing and captured its purpose. We decided to call it : See me, share my world.

(Yes, there were many in the office who felt the name was too long. But we came to love it anyway).

Because this was an art project, we knew we absolutely had to have some art in the proposal to help the reviewers understand what we were trying to do. So we found a wonderful drawing with a child’s explanation of what it was about and made that the cover of our proposal. We asked for $140,000 over two years, to be matched 100%, (largely through inkind).

And we sent the proposal off. And waited. And waited.

WE GOT THE GRANT.

Postscript:

The project was a great success all around. Our field staff told us that the art projects energized their schools and unleashed creativity they hadn’t seen. Teachers loved the project. Our local art museum featured the work from one of the countries in a small exhibit.

Two years later we were also awarded the next grant that we applied for. This one was designed for public libraries, highlighting literature art and artifacts from the countries we served, to spark a North-South dialogue on environmental issues (that was in 1990) called “Our Piece of Land is Small.”

Then I left to take a position at another organization.

Not too long after our second project completed,  USAID approached the organization directly and asked it to design a development education/research project that tested the impact of targeted education materials on its sponsors. The ultimate grant fantasy — have a funder approach you about a project. You can find a short article on that research published in 1998 by The International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy.

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.Yep. It didn’t matter so much about our programming on the ground.  Our donor communications were seen as purely “marketing” or “fundraising” and thus we not credible.

While this stung us terribly, finally, we had an opportunity for a breakthrough.

Lesson Three: You have to have and discuss a THEORY OF CHANGE

So, we decided we needed our USAID colleagues to understand better the what and why’s of our donor communications program. We were sure if they did, they would have a different opinion of us.

You see, one of the reasons that USAID was funding development education was to build more support for international aid. Leaving government aid aside, individual giving overseas rarely reaches 3% of all philanthropic dollars contributed in the US.

Yet, among the 400 largest US charities, you’ll find many child sponsorship organizations.

Why is that?

Remember that cliche that readers are only interested in local news? (Sadly, you only have to look at the very first news stories coming from the Haitian earthquake to find the truth in this).

Over 50 years of experience demonstrated the power of child sponsorship to motivate people to give by connecting them with images and stories of real people that they could learn about and maybe even communicate with.

So we had invested pretty heavily in our communications program. It included:

• an annual photo of the sponsored child and his or her family
• an annual profile of that child and family and their local community
• a description of the country, economy, and culture of the regional and country in which the family lived
• quarterly updates from our field staff describing their programs or interesting challenges in that community
• four to six updates from the child and/or family, written with the help of dedicated field staff, an offering a glimpse of daily life.  (This was the most controversial part, but a story for another forum)
• the ability of donors in the US to send correspondence back to their sponsored family, sharing a glimpse of life in the US.
• Specialty information, particularly about the world’s religions and their practices.

We had also just discovered academic research that outlined a five stage model of how individuals became more culturally aware.  That research supported many of our practices and offered a platform to explain our communications to our potential funders.

Which we did. We took a “dog and pony” show down to the development staff at USAID and walked them through our communications program step by step. We answered all of their questions. We presented our challenges very truthfully.

Did we completely convince them? No. But we could see the cracks in their skepticism.

Which was a significant step forward to winning the grant.

For next time … lessons we learned about program development, target audiences and donor portfolios.

Continued at: How we got the grant, part II

Among other things, I was struck by the data on where volunteers spend their time. According to statistics gathered by the US Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics and reported here:

Main Activities of Volunteers (2005-2007)

Fundraise                                          29.7% (RI)                       27.9% (US)
Collect/Distribute Food                 19.5%   (RI)                      24.5% (US)
Professional/Management           16.6%    (RI)                      17.4% (US)
Tutor/Teach                                       15.7%   (RI)                       20.5% (US)

At first glance I was somewhat surprised that fundraising was at the top of the volunteer activity list given the number of complaints I hear from organizations about their inability to recruit volunteers to help them raise funds.  (Don’t the choices of volunteer activities seem pretty limited.)

But when activities are matched against the top places where volunteers serve — overwhelmingly education and religious groups — the numbers made much more sense.

If you think about the legions of parents who raise money for their kids’ schools, or run events and raise money for their religious congregations, it’s not too surprising that fundraising might come out on top.

Unfortunately, what the study doesn’t tell us is the relationship of the volunteering to the amount of funds raised. Now that would be a number worth gathering.