What the Best Grant Seekers Know
When I took up pastel painting several years ago, I was eager to learn about drawing, color theory, art history, and the pastels themselves. With no experience in any of these things, I wondered, “Which of them should I focus on right away, and which can wait?”
Similarly, there’s a body of knowledge that will help launch your career in grants and another that will benefit a more seasoned professional. These are the topics that will guide your learning as you move from smaller solicitations to larger ones:
Foundations. The most modest grants require you to understand the range of institutions that award them, how they operate, how they make funding decisions, and what they expect of applicants. Candid, the Grant Professionals Association, and Inside Philanthropy offer learning materials, some for free and some at a cost.
Fund development. As you move into moderately sized grants, the competition intensifies. So it helps to be fluent in what moves people to give and how best to communicate with them. One good resource in this vein is the Association of Fundraising Professionals.
Organizational development (OD). This is a broad term that covers organization-wide change and performance. With major grants, it’s a difference maker. What transforms an exciting proposal into a magical one is your ability to give a grant maker confidence in your nonprofit’s ability to solve its problems and manage future change. Not only do you want to explain organizational strengths to funders, you want to encourage progress among your colleagues. That momentum, in turn, gives you content for funder conversations. Your part in encouraging OD internally and then touting the advances with funders is one of the most meaningful, and overlooked, roles of a major grants professional. OD resources include the National Council of Nonprofits and university-sponsored courses. There are plenty of good books about all three categories.
It’s the last of these categories that can create breakthroughs inside your office and outside it with funders of a certain size.
OD from Within
What a joy when you can convey to an investor that its award will be nurtured by staff that monitors strategic goals and adjusts work plans accordingly. Or that your organization is piloting artificial intelligence to streamline some of its most labor-intensive tasks.
The larger the grants you seek, the more that management, leadership, governance, and stewardship matter. Pluck your nonprofit’s most impressive infrastructure achievements and work in references to them when you communicate with prospects. The more your colleagues do to elevate technology, impact, and their ability to stay nimble, the more you’ll have to tout. Elements of OD will also allow your coworkers to manage incoming grants well.
If a proposed grant will force a dramatic uptick in the scale of your work, for example, do you foresee the need for internal expertise that doesn’t currently exist? Is someone other than you thinking about it? If not, how can you bring leadership into the conversation before you secure the award?
You may be silently ranting, “I didn’t sign up for this!” Embrace it. As the liaison between grantor and grantee, you are often the one to identify, if not spark conversation about, the ways in which a potentially funded grant will impact your workplace. You must understand how much a proposed project stands to push boundaries and whether your office culture will allow you to take the necessary risks.
It’s not your job to implement the change required to secure or manage a major grant. But you add immeasurable value by pinpointing needed modifications. If you have even a basic understanding of planning, program design, infrastructure, and governance, your work can move into new terrain.
OD Looking Outward
The most masterful grant seekers I’ve seen instill confidence in prospective investors. Their communications convey a subtext that shows that their office regularly diagnoses problems, tests solutions, and analyzes next steps. They talk and write in ways that highlight organizational development, and they do so through a funder’s lens. They anticipate what will matter most to a prospect based on their knowledge of the foundation and the first two categories listed above. They excel at addressing funders’ questions before they’ve been asked:
“What led your organization to move in this direction?”
“How will your nonprofit determine success?”
“How will this initiative sustain itself over time?”
OD can even be helpful when you must respond to potential weaknesses. Say your funder prefers more demographic data. You have a decision to make: Will you ignore the suggestion, or will you use it to push for internal change?
Some funders’ ideas may not jibe with the current state of your nonprofit. In those cases, you can either push back or take a moment to grieve for the grant that was not meant to be. But when a program officer verbalizes a legitimate issue that you recognize as a current deficit, consider that a win. Funder feedback often validates the conversations staff have internally. It can be a powerful force for action. I’m amazed at the number of times stellar grant seekers have taken external inputs to heart, encouraged internal progress, and ultimately secured multiple grants based on improved quality.
The Cycle Continues
You can bring foundations’ insights to your leadership, advocate for change, and watch your organization evolve. Those advances make your nonprofit more qualified for its next-stage major grants. If you’re lucky, your CEO will recognize the connection between the elements of a healthy organization and their impact on securing philanthropy of all kinds. Otherwise, you can become an ally by bringing your executive along on this cycle of creating a robust nonprofit, flaunting its progress, and funding its momentum.
It’s not just major grants. Organization development fertilizes all of your grant seeking. It impacts fund development across the board, including gifts of all sizes, systems, and donor relations.
When you can identify what your nonprofit does well, shout it to your supporters, then encourage your team to take things to the next level. Your value will stretch beyond grants. You will develop a healthier organization in the process.