Difficult economic times create an ironic and frustrating challenge for your charitable efforts: as the needs expand, the available funding shrinks. With less cash to go around, the already vigorous competition for grant money heats up. But as they say, when the going gets tough…
Scarcity of resources makes your consistent and creative use of fundamental grant writing principles more critical than ever. Here are just a few:
Only If You Build It Well, Will They Come
Savvy granting sources shower their dollars on real projects targeting real needs, using a realistic strategy. On that note, let’s keep it real—even the best grant writing won’t do much good for an activity or organization that exists primarily to pursue grants. But some carefully crafted words can work wonders for a project that combines passion with a purpose and a plan. So don’t go putting your lipstick on pigs; save it for a meaningful mission.
Color By The Numbers
Before you put fingers to keyboard, read everything you can about your granting source, its general policies, and especially the specific guidelines covering the grant you’re seeking. Then lather, rinse and repeat. The last thing you want is to deprive your worthy cause of much-needed support by providing only 10 copies of your application, instead of the 12 clearly required by the rules. Unfortunately, many overwhelmed granting sources are looking for reasons to weed your submission out of a large, intimidating stack of funding requests. Don’t make it easy on them by coloring outside the lines.
Let Your Passion Shine Through—Without Creating A Glare
Your enthusiasm for your endeavors can be a powerful ally in winning commitments from donors. At its best it’s contagious, triggering an almost spontaneous eagerness in granting sources to get behind your project. However, the flames that warm will also consume, and in the absence of well-established facts, figures and methods of measuring outcomes, unbridled passion may come across as impractical idealism. Use your excitement wisely, to add punch to your executive summary or breathe life into your budget narrative, and it will reward you.
The Toughest Job You’ll Ever Love
Assembling a successful grant application isn’t just another writing assignment, it’s more like a short term small business operation. Setting timetables, collecting information from multiple sources, and interpreting or even creating budgets will almost certainly be part of your job description. Build time into your production schedule for the necessary writing and non-writing work, as well as the inevitable delays you can’t control. Prepare yourself by drawing on valuable online tools like The Foundation Center.
In the best of times, grant money doesn’t grow on trees. But with a solid grant writing strategy, despite a challenging economic environment you can make sure the bucks stop with you.
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Reneisha Black-Ferguson is Founder and Managing Director of Proxy Prose (www.proxyprose.com), a commercial writing and editing firm where compelling content creation combines with years of project management experience.
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Bolaji Oyejide,November 22nd, 2008
If your nephew, brother, uncle or even your graphic designer friend has a flair for the creative don’t let price alone motivate a decision to have your buddy build your website. Sites like Amazon and eBay will probably never win design awards but they arguably transact more business online than any other web property due largely to their development team’s understanding of customer behavior, wants and the underlying technology driving site functionality. That said; ask yourself the following questions before you let a price break motivate you to set Uncle Luke loose on building the website that just might be your prospective customer’s first introduction to your business.
A huge part of it is the fact that they can’t build new versions of their software from scratch. They have to use all that OLD, BUGGY code from the last version, and add to it. 
No
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