Preparing Yourself for a Successful 2021: The Importance of Gathering Key Documents

We like to use the holiday season's quiet times to collect copies of key documents that will be essential to our grant writing success in the future. First, this means asking your staff and key project leaders to update their resumes.

Too many staff members do not even list their current job or their current responsibilities on their resumes. Making sure that this crucial information is current will help you with winning grants in 2021.

Along with the updated resumes, we think the holiday season is a good time to ask your leadership to prepare budgets for the projects they want to get funded in 2021. Getting this sort of information ahead of time will help everyone get real about their needs. Moreover, it will save valuable time in the coming year when you need to prepare budgets for crucial projects.

Finally, the holiday season is a good time to plan ahead and determine which educational conferences you would like to attend. Ideally, you should be preparing yourself to present a paper or make a presentation, at one or more of those conferences. 

Being able to add these kinds of publishing credentials to your resume might make a crucial difference in establishing that you have the imagination and state-off-the-art knowledge needed to implement a truly creative and effective grant project. There is almost no more sure path to success with grants.

Planning Your 2021 Grant Writing: How to Make Next Year Better Than the Last

When we discuss ideas for Lightning Fast Grant Writing, we sometimes forget to mention the power and speed that comes from simply planning ahead.

For example, one of the tasks we recommend for grant writers to get done in the month of December is to chart out the due dates for their most important grant applications.

Often you can find out the upcoming deadlines by reviewing the websites of your most important funders. We like to take that information and add it to an Excel spreadsheet that is organized in chronological order. It also works to put everything into Outlook too. You can even set up tasks to remind you to work on those particular grants ahead of time.

Ideally, these due dates can also be included in your overall fundraising planning calendar so that everyone in your fundraising department, or administrative staff, knows what to expect in the year ahead.

Although it may not be possible to pick exact dates for upcoming federal or state grant competitions, you can often guess when these grants will be available simply by checking on your prior year's experience and assuming the government funders will follow the same rough schedule in the coming year too.

Don't Skip the Basics: Tips for Grant Writers in Tough Times and Beyond

As we have said for years, when times are tough you can always win and succeed by going back to the basics. Sure. You still have to know the basics, right? 

At Drew & Associates, sticking to the basics means realizing that your time with any funder is going to be exceedingly short and that you will also be competing against other charities for the resources of the same funders. This means you have no choice except to develop a winning theme. This theme must call attention to your strengths, distract attention from your weaknesses. It must also call attention to your competitor's weaknesses and undermine their strengths. 

For example, if you are competing against an established charity with a large number of employees, then you need to stress that your volunteers are not only better role-models for your clients but also have better social networks in the larger community too. You should also mention that your volunteers are saving you money so that more of your resources are directly spent on clients. 

Along the same lines, you are wise to write out an elevator speech for your charity. This is the speech that you would give to an interested potential donor if your time with them was limited to the amount of time you spend with them in an elevator going up to the 105th floor. 

This elevator story needs to reflect the power of your winning theme. Ideally, everyone in the organization needs to memorize your elevator pitch so you can communicate with busy donors in a clear, concise, heartfelt way. We want your prospect to be motivated to go back to her office and search for more information about your organization. Of course, you should also make sure that the winning themes in your slogan, match those in your elevator speech, and also on the website too. 

A fellow grant writer reminded us that our charities tend to be better at fundraising than they are at saving money. This means that every time we write a grant proposal we look for some ingenious cost-saving measure which can be highlighted as evidence of our thriftiness. The trick is to let the funder know that you are interested in cost-saving measures and that you are in the process of streamlining your organization. This effort at self-improvement should be taking place, day after day, in good times and bad.  

It is probably a good idea to remember that, in good times and bad, grantmakers want to make sure that the organizations applying for grants really need the money.  They also want to be certain that the money they give will be spent wisely and make an impact.  Funders are eager to justify their grants to their board members and other stakeholders. Accordingly, they are looking for thoughtful ways of measuring impact. You can do that too. You should, however, look for impacts that are also in line with your winning theme. 

You do not want to shoot yourself in the foot by measuring things that make your nonprofit look worse. Instead, you should report measures which show off your strengths. You may, in fact, need to reinvent your field to make that happen. If that is the case, do it. The alternative is to be trapped in the position of being second best. 

Compelling Reasons Why Your Charity Needs Foundation Grants to Survive

According to Dr. Drew, managing director of Drew & Associates, “I see profound evidence supporting why your non-profit organization should stress grant writing for foundation funding in 2021 and maybe even longer.”

Those reasons are:

Stable Giving – Foundations must make charitable grants – in good times and bad – of at least 5% of their assets, averaged over five years. Importantly, foundations frequently increase their donations in challenging times to compensate for the financial difficulties charities face. 2020 has been no exception. According to our friends at Foundation Search – over 7,500 US foundations have explicitly launched COVID-19 relief initiatives. They believe this number will increase significantly in 2021.

Predictable giving – Foundations exist to donate to charity, unlike individuals and corporations, who have a variety of shifting interests and priorities that are dependent on a robust economy.  Foundations often publish giving guidelines relating to geographic and philanthropic areas of giving interest – furthermore, analysis of giving through time indicates that most foundations maintain a strong, consistent focus in the areas they support.

Low risk / low cost – unlike high expenditure / high risk fundraising efforts like golf tournaments and galas, foundation fundraising requires very little upfront investment, typically $5,000-$15,000, and with the average single foundation grant amount of $59,300 (2019, 2020), it provides the most cost-efficient method of fundraising – all that is required to start is a funding database which identifies good funding prospects, a good letter, and a few stamps and envelopes.

Low effort – relative to almost any other form of fundraising, approaching foundations requires fewer resources to succeed. This is particularly true of the upfront work in sorting through the over 135,000 U.S. foundations to identify a list of “best prospects” for your project, a task that a few years ago could consume months of effort. Foundation funding information and management systems are now able to intelligently and accurately identify a shortlist of the best prospects for a variety of project funding needs, including COVID-19 funding – and recommend a safe asking amount based on the funders prior giving history.  The balance of the upfront effort simply involves writing and sending a letter of inquiry to your foundation prospects to determine their interest in helping you.

Growth – the most recent CCS Fundraising survey (August, 2020)  indicates that foundation funding was the fastest-growing giving source since 2015-19, growing at a rate of 5.7%, compared to 3.2% for giving by individual donors. Foundations gave $72  billion, in the form of an estimated 1,164,000 grants – that is more than one grant for every two charities in the US so your odds of getting funded – if you apply of course – are good.

Increased credibility for you and your organization – well, once you get funded by a foundation that is. When you are successful in attracting a foundation grant you will open up many doors in the foundation and corporate world for your organization for years to come – you have proven that you are worth funding and can deliver. 

Diversification of funding sources – financial advisors will strongly advise you not to put your life savings into a single stock or sector; for the same reason, having a variety of funding sources—including foundation funding—will strengthen your organization and protect it from the sharp downturns every economy periodically experiences.

Foundations – Why Should They be Key to Your Pandemic Treasure Hunt?

Our staff at Drew & Associates speaks with hundreds of non-profits and foundations each month.

The news we are hearing tells us that too many of the reliable strategies charities traditionally used to raise money in 2020 have proven inadequate.

The worst-hit has been to events-based fundraising, which, according to the folks at Foundation Search, “has shrunk in terms of proceeds by over 70% since March 2020.”

Sadly, individual giving has also dropped in 2020. Individual donors are feeling less generous, in part, because of the side effects of double-digit unemployment and bleak job futures.

As you might expect corporate giving is in trouble too. Corporate philanthropy is flat in the financial and technology sectors, and down significantly in most other sectors, including energy, resources, retail, travel and hospitality.

Is 2021 going to be better?

Despite the late summer optimism as COVID-19 cases fell and lockdowns eased, many forecasters are now saying it will very likely be a “2020 repeat” given the fall spike in cases, despite prospects for an effective vaccine, and hopefulness about its wide-spread distribution.

So, what should a non-profit do to stay alive (and perhaps even thrive) in 2021?

We believe that the things that worked in 2020 should continue to work in 2021.

Thanks to all the reports we have received from a considerable number of clients and other non-profits, we know that 2020 has been a good year to date for foundation giving 

Importantly, over 7,500 US foundations have announced funding initiatives directly focusing on COVID-19 relief.

Since April, we have directly assisted over 25 charities in their efforts to locate and secure COVID-19 emergency funding.

If you are still looking for assistance, contact us for our most recent COVID-19 funders list – it is free for the asking for all non-profits. Call Drew & Associates at 949-338-5921.