Find Yourself a Great CPA: How To Win Grants By Having Excellent Financial Records

Sadly, one of the obstacles that can keep a charity from winning a grant is having poor financial record keeping. This gloomy conclusion might make even more sense if you look at the non-profit organization from the point of view of the skeptical, even cynical foundation executive.

Although your grant proposal may have all the right research and all the right foundation buzz words, a lack of financial information can seriously weaken, even undercut all your great work as a grant writer. The role of solid financials is so great to your eventual success in winning grants that some grant writers refuse to even work with non-profits unless they have stellar financial statements already in place. 

As a rough and ready consulting firm, however, Drew & Associates takes a different approach. In particular, we focus on helping non-profits improve their record keeping, deliver reasonable financial statements, and secure low cost audits or even lower cost accountant compilations or reviews. 

 In our experience, most foundations know that a genuine audit including testing of your financial records by a competent CPA is just too expensive to justify. In my case, I have often told non-profit leaders that Trish and I would gladly donate to the charity if we were confident the money would go into a high quality audit.

Nevertheless, all the funders really want to see - in the end - is something that looks like an audited financial statement. 

In other words, they want you to keep your records in Quickbooks or some other financial accounting software and then produce for them a Statement of Activities which basically shows your income and expenses for the previous calendar or fiscal year and a Statement of Financial Position which shows the overall strength of your charity by reporting your assets and liabilities. I always thought it was odd that the Statement of Financial Position also reports what happens when you add your net assets and liabilities together. 

I always thought that the only really important number was your net assets - or your charity's actual net worth. Instead, I now understand that adding net assets and liabilities together shows the funder how large your organization is in general.

Compelling Power: Charismatic Leaders Teach Us the Value of Simplicity

As a political scientist, I have always been fascinated by the biographies of charismatic leaders like John Kennedy, Nelson Mandela or Mahatma Gandhi. As I studied their speeches and other communications I began to note certain common themes that gave their communications greater urgency, effectiveness and persuasive power. I will share one of their most compelling techniques in this article: They keep things simple. 

For example, when Napoleon returned from his exile on the Island of Elba to retake his throne in France, his directions to his band of followers was exceedingly simple - walk in a straight line to Paris.

Above all, I was impressed by the simplicity of their communications. I think simplicity is effective in grant writing because it give the funder confidence that you understand what you are doing, that you will be able to implement your project, and that they will be able to understand what you are doing and explain what you are doing to their bosses too. 

In grant writing, I am always looking for ways to simplify the presentation of an idea. I typically look for funding for the single most attractive aspect of the charity and pay less attention to the myriad of lesser programs that clutter up the agency's programmatic agenda. 

How to Leverage the Most Strategically Visible Parts of a Grant Application

While I have not seen formal research on where a person's eye travels when they first read a grant proposal, I paid attention to my own habits and have generalized them to assist our clients. Ironically, if you understand how to speed read, you will also have clues about how to position your information so that it has the most dramatic impact on the reader. For a quick overview of speed reading, check out the video below: 

 

How To Speed Read

For example, in most of the grant proposals that we write we include photos. Part of the reason we do this is that photos subconsciously send a powerful message about the quality of your non-profit and your attention to detail. Accordingly, I like to find the best lit, best focused, and most contemporary photos I can find off the internet or from the collection established by the non-profit itself. 

What people may not realize, however, is that I am betting that people are more likely to read the captions under the photos than the text of the document itself. Consequently, I make the caption extremely easy to read and I build into it the most powerful, compelling message associated with that charity. 

I also assume that people will be more likely to read your footnotes than your actual grant application. For this reason, I pay great attention to the footnotes, seeking to make them readable, persuasive, recent, and consistent with the winning message/image of the non-profit organization. 

Assuming that people scan headlines in a grant application just as they scan headlines in a newspaper or on a website, I also pay particular attention to making sure that each headline is catchy, interesting, and consistent with the non-profit's overall winning message. I have found it helps to spice up the headline by adding a little alliteration, a reference to a current movie or television show, or an interesting play on words. 

No matter what, I assume that the reader will most likely be scanning my application, looking for excuses to turn it down, and that the best way to win their support it to seed the most compelling messages into the portions of the grant they are most likely to first study and concentrate on reading.  

Borrowing from the Pros: How to Get the Most Out of Your Grant Cover Letter

As a political scientist, I am always interested in how political consultants used direct mail to raise money and advertise their political candidates. As a grant writing consultant, I have adopted a lot of these same techniques to benefit the non-profit clients we serve at Drew & Associates. Many of the political consultant's best ideas were the result of early eye tracking experiments. For a look at some of the most recent developments in eye tracking, please check out the video below: 

For example, it turns out that when someone opens a letter the first thing that attracts their eyes is the appearance of their own name. Consequently, I am very careful about having my staff double check the spelling of the recipient's name and also their title. My view is that if we make a mistake with the grant reader's name, then we immediately make a bad impression. If we get their name exactly correct, however, we will have used that initial millisecond of exposure to immediately win the trust and confidence of the reader. 

This is why I refuse to issue letters of inquiry or cover letters that are simply addressed to generic appellations like "To Whom It May Concern" or "Dear Sir or Madam." I also use a Ms. or Mr. when I address the letter reader too. If the person's name gives me little indication of their gender, then I try to Google them to figure out the appropriate term of address. If they have a non-English name that I am unfamiliar with, then I will Google that too.

I also avoid using the generic term Grant Administrator or Grant Coordinator. Instead, I review the funder's website or research printout and address the letter to their president or chair. To make sure that I get the name exactly right, I will cut and paste it directly from the website.

It turns out that the next place a person's eye goes to when they read your letter of inquiry or your cover letter is your own signature. Try this yourself and notice how your eyes move over the next letter you receive in the mail. I also seek to leverage this initial bit of information too. If you have ever taken one of my grant writing workshops, then you will remember that I spend time teaching people how to create a professional looking signature. Too often, I have seen people labor over a grant application and then - at the last minute - undercut their own effort by signing the application or cover letter as if they just finished an increasingly rare third grade penmanship class. Instead, I recommend signing quickly, like you are a doctor signing a prescription. The signature, by the way, should be done with blue ink. We use blue ink so that the reader understands that the signature is applied with a pen and not done with a photo image the same color as the text.

Finally, the folks who taught me about political direct mail always stressed the P.S. at the end of the letter. For some reason, people will scan the entire letter first, but then zero in on the P.S., or post script, at the end of the letter. To take advantage of that habit, I like to place the most compelling message regarding the charity and its project in the P.S. I rarely send out any letter of inquiry or cover letter without including a P.S. 

P.S. If you follow these tips, you will be using the reader's most basic habits to quickly get a powerful first impression established in their minds in six seconds or less.