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.

Setting Up a Grantsmanship Library to Speed Up the Application Process

The process of grant writing quickly exposes you and your charity to a "survival of the fittest" environment.  Ironically, you will be harming yourself and your charity if you spend too much time grant writing, get too perfectionistic, or drag out the process too long. Thus, one of the most important secrets of grant writing is to recognize that you are in a dangerous spot and to get through it as quickly as possible.  One of the biggest problems I see in the field of grant writing is that very few people are timing how long it takes them to write a grant.  If more of us - me included - did a better job measuring the length of time needed to produce a full-proposal, then I think we would be more likely to look for new technology, short-cuts, and other tricks of the trade to speed up our grant writing.  In my case, for example, I found a lot of practical wisdom in the traditional tenets of the grant writing literature...but only after I reinterpreted these recommendations as tools for saving time.  One of the most important techniques I use as a grant writing consultant is to create a "grantsmanship" library for each client.  In this library, I collect - ahead of time - the key documents that will be needed as part of a hard-copy or on-line grant application.  These documents include copies of the agency's 501 ( c ) 3 determination letter, their IRS 990 form, a list of their Board members, their annual audit, and resumes for the Executive Director and key program officers.  I put these items in files, agency by agency, and then place them in a filing cabinet that is within easy reach. My rule is that the more often I use something, the closer I store it next to me.  As I like to demonstrate in the Grant Writing Fundamentals class, I want to see the grant writer's chair right next to the grantsmanship library.  Below, I'm including an excerpt from my, "A Really Great Booklet on Grant Writing," which indicates the elements of a grantsmanship library: Link to List of Elements for Your Grantsmanship Library Your ability to move quickly in a crisis - to act decisively - will be favorably influenced by this simple practice of organizing your key materials ahead of time.  If you do not yet have a grantsmanship library, please do yourself a favor and get started on it now.  I think you'll be glad you did.