One of the most exciting moments in my Grant Writing Fundamentals course is when I open up my subscription to the Foundation Center's On-Line Directory and show the participants all the grants the funders have given to charities in their community. This never gets old. Participants who are new to grant writing are astounded by the sheer number of grants, their size, and the detailed information you can harvest about the funders.
| Check Out This Video for Tips on Using the Foundation Center's Online Directory. |
One of the most basic fundamentals of success in grant writing is for a grant writer to ignore the time-consuming clutter of questionable on-line resources and instead devote their attention to the best available resource for learning about and finding funders, The Foundation Center in New York. This is the oldest, most reliable non-profit resource for grant writers.
In addition to directing participants to this extremely significant website, I like to point out that the Foundation Center maintains an on-line directory which is the best possible tool for researching grants. Their Essential Plan gives you access to the most important features of their database, at a price of $49.99/mo. You can save $16.77 amonth if you make your annual payment as a lump sum. (You can also get access to the results of this database by working with Drew & Associates.)
Thankfully, you can get access to the Foundation Center's On-Line Directory for free by visiting one of their network partners. For a list of the partnership organizations that give you free access to the On-Line Directory, please click on the following link. As their website indicates, they provide free funding information through more than 450 Funding Information Network locations - libraries, community foundations, and other nonprofit resource centers located across the U.S. and several countries. They even provide a resource to help you find a network location near you if you click on this link.
As a professional grant writing consultant, I use a number of tricks and techniques to speed up the process for finding good matches for our client's most important projects. Overall, I organize my search by looking at the largest funders. These are the funders which actually are the easiest to win money from and the best to get to know and build a relationship with over the long-run.
Next, I always make it a practice to click on the limitations line in the funder's report first. If it turns out that my client is not eligible for a grant from that funder, I need to know that information right away. Otherwise, I will waste time getting lost in the details of the funder's profile.
Third, I am especially careful to read through the funder's interests to make sure that they are interested in the same topics as my clients and that the funder is also willing to support the type of funding that my clients are looking for whether that funding is for programs, capital campaigns, or general operating expenses.
Fourth, I eliminate from my search the funders who say that they do not accept applications. In my experience, they are telling you the truth. In most cases, the funders that say this are too small to support a professional staff or else have decided to give funding to a handful of charities that are closest to them, charities which may employ the funder's children and grandchildren. It is not worth my time to deal with funders if they are not open to supporting new charities.
Finally, I do pay attention to how the funder distributes its grants among funding categories. If they tend to give a lot of their grants to arts and culture, then I will pay more attention to them if I am contracted by an arts and culture client. All of this is important since I believe that at least one-half of your success as a grant writer depends on doing high quality grant research. I have, at times, written what I thought was a weak application, but nevertheless won a grant simply because I appealed to the exactly right funder.
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