Demystifying the world of grants

As a small rural town, grant funding is an important source of dollars to help bring community ideas to life. Let’s explore this topic behind the scenes a bit.

Grants help our local ski and snowmobile clubs keep trails maintained, provide programs like the 21st Century grant helping get kids outside at the elementary school and so much more. There are federal grants, state grants, private foundation grants, public foundation grants and each type typically requires different levels of complexity for the application and reporting. For a community project it can be tempting to think, “someone should just find a grant for it, because there’s so many out there.” However, it can be challenging to find the right fit.

Currently, as businesses navigate COVID-19 grants, they might find a steep learning curve as they suddenly must keep track of all the different requirements and manage the puzzle of money to make sure they’re spending each dollar exactly as the grant requirements specify. Nonprofits, which more commonly work with grants, are often more used to navigating this process. Let’s shed some light on how to think through it all.

The world of grants can be a full-time job! Larger nonprofits might have a grant writer on staff or contract out a professional grant writer. In smaller organizations this complex task is often left to a staff person wearing many hats or to board members volunteering their time. Whoever is keeping track of the grant process will quickly learn the importance of planning ahead, being organized and detail oriented and the need for clear, succinct communication.

You need to research what opportunities are available and when each deadline is and evaluate if your idea is a good fit for each grant’s requirements. Many grants are restricted, perhaps only funding “bricks and mortar,” or only funding brand new projects rather than providing ongoing support for established programs. They might also only be a reimbursable grant where you have to find other money first and be repaid or might only match a certain amount of other money that you raise and so on. This can make it tough to juggle how to pay for different components of a project.

Alternatively, project planning and grant writing often become a hurry-up-and-wait situation, where you get all your ducks in a row and create a perfect plan and then must wait, sometimes six months or more, to learn whether your grant application was approved, and if so at what amount. It can be a long road to pull together all the pieces needed, at the right times, to make your dream happen!

Here are two tips on grant writing:

1. Read the full application first. This sounds basic but can be hard to remember. Often you will see a grant opportunity and be so excited that it’s a perfect fit for your project, only to read on and discover details hidden in questions throughout an application that require a lot of preparation or that might disqualify you. Reading the full application right away lets you plan ahead for what all you will need to collect and give yourself enough time to get everything in order.

2. Pick up the phone and call the grant maker, if possible. Before investing much time in writing lengthy application responses, it can be incredibly helpful to talk with the people who administer the grant. They have a great sense of what they’re looking to fund and can provide a wealth of information, usually much more than what is simply on a website. A conversation can make a big difference by helping you hone in on the way they want you to talk about your project in your proposal, and therefore be much more competitive.

It is helpful to think of writing a grant application as similar to writing a mini business plan. You have to really think through your goals, how you will structure your project, lay out who will benefit from it, how you will measure success and more. A fellow grant-writer-by-default in the valley noted that “as painful as all the writing and reporting can be, the process really sets you up for success. It really gets your mind in the right place because it forces you to think through what exactly you are trying to accomplish.”

However, much time and energy can be spent researching, preparing for and writing grants, which feels discouraging if the proposal ultimately isn’t funded. And if you do receive funding, substantial reporting after your project ends is often required. A promising trend is starting among some of the largest grant-making foundations in the country: they recognize the burden of all this work, and are trying to reevaluate their requirements and streamline their application and reporting processes to still provide important accountability for how the money was spent, but reduce some of the paperwork. However, as every grant-making organization has their own requirements, application questions and so on, the shift to streamline the world of grants will no doubt be slow.

How does this pertain to you if you’re not a grant writer yourself? Who knows, maybe one day you’ll have an idea for a community project you’d like to see happen and end up jumping in to help work on a grant to make your idea become reality!