Author Archives: lkeyes70

Grantwriting: Letters of Support

Leave a reply

Letters of Support


Who Contributes Letters of Support?

Letters of support are used to strengthen a grant application. These typically come from three kinds of supporters; collaborators, constituents, or outside endorsers. Collaborators add credibility to a grant application, and most, if not all funders prefer to see evidence of collaboration, and saving of duplication and overlap.


Collaborators

Collaborators are those who are participating in the project with you. Their letters of support should include sufficient information so that the funder will be aware of the collaborator’s participation and allow the funder to evaluate the collaborator’s contribution to the project. Letters from collaborators should include the following:


Description of the nature of the collaboration


Non-financial contributions to project if applicable. Such contributions could include:

• Expertise

• Deliverables, i.e. products, reports, evaluation services, etc.

• Personnel

• Resources


Financial Contributions if applicable. These may include

• Cash

• In-kind contributions (non- monetary services, to which a cost may be attached.)

• Matching funds


Financial Arrangements

If the collaborator is receiving a piece of the grant funding, then this should also be spelled out in the letter.

Include expected outcomes, results, and value resulting from the collaboration.

State what the benefits will be from the collaboration. Use numbers and examples.

Outside Endorsers

Outside Endorsers are people who no direct participation in execution of the project, but who do have a stake the project’s outcome . Outside Endorsers add credibility and weight your application.

Typical Outside Endorsers

• Colleagues in the field

• Others who have funded your work

• Politicians, Government Agencies familiar with your work


Letters need to make clear:

• Relationship between your agency and endorser

• Value and results obtained or demonstrated


Examples:

• A youth services agency endorses a project run by a trade association designed to create apprenticeships in a particular technical field. The youth agency might not be directly involved in the project, but it might make the point that the youth agencyʼs clients would benefit from an apprenticeship program, The youth agencyʼs letter might also contribute background statistics on demographics and need for opportunities for out-of-school youth not planning to go to college.


• A local development corporation endorses the same project, citing statistics about the loss of jobs in the local county, and the need for positioning the local work force to take advantage of newly emerging business opportunities in renewable energy.



Constituents

Letters from constituents and beneficiaries benefit from concrete facts and figures for the current grant

application. Individual stories are very powerful. Any letter with specific outcomes will be more powerful

than one citing generalities.


For example, a student in an adult learning program might include statements such as:


Before coming to The Learning Center, I was reading at a third-grade level. I worked with teachers and volunteers at TLC for two years, and was able to raise my reading level to sixth grade”. After working as a laborer for seven years, I have entered a two year apprenticeship program for electricians, and expect to graduate as a licensed journeyman electrician in May of this year.

Since such testimonials may be used across several applications, be sure that they up-to-date A fresh

copy of a letter with a current date and signature will be evidence of current support and relevance.


Constituent Letter Components:

Constituent letters should include:

• Background of the constituent

• Relationship with your agency

• How the constituent benefited.


Example Benefits

Constituent letters provide third-party evidence of your efficacy as an agency, any statistics cited will

provide additional credibility. Numbers rule! For example:


• Home-healthcare: Number of home-health care patients served, compared with last year. How many

home healthcare nurses and aids participated? What is the ratio of nurses to patients? Are total costs

and cost per patient going up or down? How many patients were served at home as opposed to nursing

homes?


• Number of jobs created. Number of new companies created. Number companies declaring bankruptcy

or moving out of the area. Net gain or loss of jobs? Type and quality of jobs; Average salary

and benefits. Number of jobs upgraded or saved.


• Land Conservation: Acres of land conserved. Numbers of conservation easements,


General Guidelines for Letters of Support

Introduce yourself. Include a description and qualifications of the letter writer.

Addressee should be either the funder or your agency

Include a sentence about the experience or history with your agency, if available

Specifically cite the solicitation number and solicitation title if these exist. Many funders are fielding applications

for multiple programs.

One or two paragraphs of text in the body of the letter

Use specifics; numbers, timelines, outcomes.

Specify expected outcomes (with numbers) of your relationship with the funder.


Format

• No more than one page in length

• Letter should be on the contributorʼs own letterhead

• Include a written signature and title of an official of the contributorʼs agency or company

• Submit as a .PDF file and and/or hard copy


Regarding the last point; most grant applications these days are submitted electronically. At least some of the narrative components will include longer discussions created within a word-processor (Microsoft Word for example) and then exported to an Adobe .PDF file. The .PDF files are then either uploaded individually to the grantmakerʼs web site, or the files may be combined into a single long .PDF which is uploaded or sent as an eMail attachment. Because of the logistics involved, it makes sense to try to get letters of support early on, and if you canʼt get .PDF files from letter providers, you need to be able to either convert the files they send you to .PDF yourself, or use a scanner to create a .PDF from a hard copy. Donʼt beat up your letter providers if they canʼt give you a .PDF. Make sure you have the tools in place to do the conversions if needed.


Timing


Outside Endorsers

Outside endorsers can be solicited early in the grant application process; as soon as you have a solid program abstract available to enclose in your request for the letter. You’ll need the abstract so that they know what they are endorsing. The abstract also may prompt them to contribute additional ideas for developing a strong application. “You really should go and talk to …. “


Collaborators

Collaborators should include a general description of the financial arrangements and commitments in their letters of support. Solicit letters from collaborators after the budget and program plan have been defined and you have a working agreement in place.


Constituents

Constituent letters are usually less time sensitive, because the background material in these deals with things that have already happened. However it is wise not to wait until the last minute, especially if you think you might have .PDF formatting and conversion issues.

Twitter Resources

Leave a reply

Because they have published an open API, Twitter has spawned a slewof applications. Here is a list of applications that appear in The Twitter Book by O’Reilly.

Twitter Shrinkers

140it will trim down your post to conform to the 140 character limit.

Bit.ly will shrink a long URL, and will also allow you track the clickthroughs

is.gd shrinks down a URL really tightly, but does not allow tracking

Twi.bz shrinks down a URL, but preserves the underlying domain.

So, let’s see what these services would produce. Let’s say I’m posting a tweet that points to a blog entry at http://www.techfornonprofits.com…. Here is the original URL:

http://www.techfornonprofits.com/blogger/2010/01/sample-grant-policies-and-procedures.html

Bit.ly shrinks this to: http://bit.ly/4DKNhb

is.gd shrinks this to: http://is.gd/72s3T As they say, 72 characters shorter!

Twi.bz shrinks this to: http://techfornonprofits.twi.bz/a Indeed it preserves the domain name.

Searches and Trends

http://search.twitter.com

http://hashtags.org

http://tagal.us

http://whatthetrend.com

http://monitter.com allows you to monitor multiple topics in realtime.

http://tweetmeme.com
monitors links posted in Twitter, and ranks them by popularity in real time.

Clients

http://www.twhirl.org/

http://tweetdeck.com/

Combination of Client + Search + Stats

http://www.twitscoop.com
Still trying to figure this out. Check out the interactive topic cloud.

http://twopular.com/ shows trending topics over various time spans

Organize a Tweetup
http://twtvite.com/

Europe’s Promise

Leave a reply

In the concluding chapter of Europe’s Promise by Stephen Hill the author describes a conversation that he has with a native Austrian in a Salzburg cafe.

“As an American, I wonder if you can even imagine what it must be like to live in a country where every person has health care. And a decent retirement. And day care, parental leave, sick leave, education, vacation, job retraining. for every plumber, carpenter, taxi driver, waitress, executive, sales clerk, scientist, musician, poet, nurse, of all ages, income, race, sex, whatever, not worrying about those basic arrangements. Can you imagine what that is like?”

At first I didn’t see where he was going with this. He spoke with such passion to point out the obvious. But then suddenly the lightbulb went on. I had never really thought about it before: what impact does it have on an individual’s psyche–and by extension on all of society and our feeling of extended family, which is after all the “sticky glue” that holds us all together–to know that certain basics will always be taken care of because you are a stakeholding member of that society, entitled to certain benefits? Certainly it is hard for an American, raised as an atomized individual in the “ownership” (i.e., “on your own”) society to step into the shoes of a European and imagine what that sense of security and support must feel like and how it affects your overall outlook.
“In America you are so rich” he said. “Why don’t you have these things for your people?”

We are watching yet another slipping away of health care reform, for the simple reason that a single Republican has replaced the former Senator of Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy’s Democratic seat in the U.S. Senate. This lowers the Democratic majority from 60% to 59% and yet the Democrats refuse to override arcane rules of their own chamber to push through a health care reform bill. Europe is so far ahead of us in health care and other basic life support, that we are beginning to look more like a third-rate country. With the current state of health care we really are a third-rate country; paying double for health outcomes that put us somewhere below Slovenia.

Hill’s book describes several differences in European outlook and institutions:
1. Health care, shorter work-weeks, double vacation times, paid day-care, paid maternity leave, paid paternity leave, national retirement plans that pay double or triple what our social-security system pays … , no-cost or very low cost university education.
2. Mandatory worker representation on corporate boards. (Europe has 170 Fortune 500 companies compared with 140 in the U.S.)
3. Publicly financed election campaigns. Proportional representation in their legislatures with multiple parties combining in coalitions. There are no “safe seats”, or gerrymandered districts. Senators cannot hold entire political agendas hostage while they lobby for perks that enrich their own state, or more likely their corporate contributors. And of course our congress and many government officials already have a government health-care plan.
4. A ten year or more advance on energy policy. (20% of Germany’s energy production will be renewable by 2015).
5. An order-of-magnitude narrower gap between the lowest wage earner and the highest salary earner.
The book gives voice to the uneasy notion that after the disaster of the Bush/Cheney years, the Obama revival is petering out. Maybe it never got started after Obama backed down on virtually every campaign promise and every opportunity for real reform.
I’m asking myself, how bad does it have to get?
After Hurricane Katrina, I thought we will definitely fix the bureaucratic policies and bungling so that New Orleans will be rebuilt.
After the bank bailouts, I thought we would definitely re-regulate the banks, re-separating investment banking from retail banking. A reasonable person might have expected that the notion of multi-million dollar bonuses for staff of bailed out banks would be considered an obscenity, and that banks would be required to restructure predatory mortgage loans.
After the collapse of the auto industry, you might think we’d start to re-think the stupid tax incentives that created the SUV, that we’d begin taxing gasoline at a reasonable rate to incentivize people to buy more efficient vehicles and to subsidize new technology, and that we’d install new management in the Detroit Big Three, (or, frankly, retool the idle factories to create mass-transit vehicles, solar cells, and windmills). After all the taxpayer “bought” those factories.
I thought maybe we’d throw in the towel in Afghanistan and Iraq and begin to re-think our failed military strategy and the whole purpose of spending ever-increasing billions each year on a military, where we can’t even field more than a couple hundred thousand soldiers, at a million dollars per year at a pop.
I thought we’d close the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay. Surely this is one of the most medieval legacies of the Bush/Cheney years, and it is a disgrace.
The very good news, however, is that Europe’s Promise points out, with dozens of examples, how a very complex multi-cultural society can achieve consensus and create a better life for ordinary citizens. Having lived in both Europe in Canada in years past, and with regular contact with family in the “old country”, I agree that life there seems much as described in the book, and that there are many elements that should be included in a 21st century version of the American Dream.

Backing Up in 2010 Part I

1 Reply

I’m coming into an organization with fresh eyes, and wondering about the whole issue of backup. Currently they have a massive Dell server with RAID 5 drives at the headquarters. There are about five administrative staff, and four teaching staff at headquarters.
Each of five field offices has 1-2 staff. Each staff person has their own desktop machine. Some have personal laptops which they use when away from the office. Data is stored on thumb drives when transferred between the laptops and the desktops.
Headquarters has an HP DAT backup system with DAT tapes that back up the data directories on the storage. Assuming each headquarters staff uses their designated storage folder on the server, they can be assured that their data is being backed up. Backups occur at the end of each day. There are two Friday tapes. One of these is stored offsite at the end of the week. The staff is trained and comfortable with this arrangement.
In the field offices, a previous regime installed little USB hard drives which are attached to each staffer’s PC. An automatic backup program periodically copies the data directory to the hard drive.
The current arrangement has several issues:
  • Field office data never gets formally transferred to headquarters. Although there is much back and forth via eMail attachments, the contents of the field office hard drives never get transferred.
  • Backup is not offsite. If a fire occurs in the field office, it is probable that all the data will be destroyed and unrecoverable. Guess what just happened a month ago with one of the field offices?
  • EMail is not backed up.
    • So, the question is, how can we protect ourselves from ourselves?, or in other words, automatically secure all of our data in a somewhat undisciplined organization with a comprehensive yet unobtrusive backup system?