Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of the party! I have listed my grants and funding portfolio, which is available here. What isn’t immediately from the listing is how much grant funding is a team sport…and that often the suggestions for funding come from others, as well as contributions for the application.
In designing our non-profit CRM, we have been looking at all of the functions that we’d like to track. At a minimum, we think each of the entities above will use one database table. In practice each entity will have an associated “interaction” table and “look-up” tables that feed picklists of options.
A little background. Our organization makes grants to schools and community groups. Many of these grants are funded through commercial sponsors, or through philanthropic individuals or organizations. Thus we have both Grant Prospecting and Grant Application Management functions.
Grant Prospecting — This is us prospecting and managing the workflow involved in applying for a grant. Recently when it gets down to the application process itself we have we have worked in Slack.
Grant Application Management — As we receive grant applications we have to process them and eventually evaluate them. We currently use LimeSurvey for our online grant application.
Sponsor Prospecting — If we don’t have an individual or foundation donor, we may fund a program through a sponsor; a company that wants to promote their community engagement or charitable contributions.
Contact Management — The contact table part of our design includes all the usual information about contacting a person In our database design, this may actually turn out to be a hidden many to many table. One of the objectives that I want to address is the ability to look at a single person’s contact information and determine what our relationship(s) are with that person. A person could be a donor, a member, a volunteer, a member of our board, member of our advisory board. and our lawyer. This is really what CRM is all about, as well as the ability to track the relationship steps with the person at any stage of the relationship.
Membership (Donor) Management. We used to do this in Little Green Light. We’re not sure our business model going forward lends itself to membership.. but if it does, this is where we’d like to track members.
Media / Outreach Lists — We have 3782 media contacts to which we send press releases etc.
Admin — Could we provide forms for our usual HR functions like time sheets, vacation accrual, expense reimbursement, travel schedules, etc?
Note that this design exercise is independent of any particular kind of software. We have bits of data scattered in spreadsheets, word-processing files, online applications such as LimeSurvey and Little Green Light, FileMaker databases and of course eMail.
Update: I’ve added two additional tables; one for “contacts” (which will feed its contact and address data to the other tables), and “projects” table which contains data about each project.
What distresses to me is that there are so many creative, innovative and worthy ideas out there, but we can’t fund them all. Many times I’m reading about a terrific program idea, and rooting for it all along; then something goes awry and the application gets placed in the rejection pile.
I can’t respond to each and every applicant who didn’t make it, but if I could, here is what I’d tell them.
1. Read our instructions. We provided a PDF of the full grant application with all of the questions, and a full description of all of the scoring criteria. So we’re mystified that people obviously didn’t take advantage of these resources because clearly they hadn’t read the material. Among other hints, we stated that a successful application will show that you have support from your community, qualified personnel, and a coherent sustainability plan. We need you to show us how you will succeed.
2. Work out the answers to the questions before applying. Especially with online applications, the best approach is to have text available in a word-processing document so that you can simply cut and paste into our online form.
3. A grant application is an opportunity to put together a program with objectives, measures and value. Be able to articulate each of these clearly, with a series of bullets. Our application has a question; “Describe your program”. You must be able to describe your program in sufficient detail so that we can see see that you know what you are doing.
4. Unless you are specifically apply for a “planning grant”, don’t say you are planning, contemplating, or working something out. Say what you will actually do if we give you our money, equipment, and resources.
5. Tell us who is going to execute your proposal and their experience and qualifications.
6. What are the objectives of your project? How are you going to measure your success? What is the value to your constituency, your partners and wider community?
7. You can’t always do everything by yourself. What other resources are you providing and who are you working with on this problem? Applications get points for creating linkages and forming partnerships. As a grantmaker, we love leveraging the modest awards that we can make so that together we can accomplish as much as possible.
8. Start earlier! I’m always surprised how many applications came in on the last minute of the last hour of the deadline date. This may be fine if you don’t run into any technical problems, (or if we do on our end!) but it could be a disaster if something goes wrong.
9. Several applications didn’t make it because the applicant couldn’t manage our online application system. (We use the open-source LimeSurvey.) Among other things our application requires that you attach photos and pdf files. There are limitations on file sizes and formats. As I said to several applicants, “we’re really sorry that you are having trouble, but we have received several hundred applications successfully, so we don’t think the problem is on our end.”
9. We asked for a minimum of one letter of support from a partner, sponsor, or from your community, that is, someone other than the applicant. This needed to be either scanned and attached as a PDF.
10. We asked for photos. It may be a cliche, but a picture can be worth a thousand words.
You may not believe it, but we really enjoy evaluating responses to our grant proposals.The best (competitive) applications are not just complete and well-written; they have something creative, innovative and special which make them stand out. Some of the more interesting proposals build on an existing successful program which provides evidence that you can pull off the new project.
Finally, please keep trying! If you didn’t manage to get everything together on the first try, you have a leg up when you try next year. We look forward to seeing your improved proposal.
This article originally appeared on LinkedIn.
We have just put Slack through its paces as a collaboration platform for applying for a couple of grants. We had a distributed team of three core team members:
Like all grant applications these days, the application is online. The grantor uses Foundant as their online platform, which provides a pretty good interface for the applicant.
Text-based attachments are usually PDF files, so you need some way to create these and combine them. Native Macintosh apps like Numbers can create PDFs. It also turns out that you can combine PDFs using the Mac Preview program. You can’t do this with the free Adobe Reader which I found out to my chagrin, loosing an hour or so in the process of trying.
Since we were working from home and from the office, with both Windows and Macs, we needed a common place to store source files that we were adding to the online application.
OmmWriter on Windows and is now available for the Mac and iPad. (I used the Mac text utility.) OmmWriter can export directly to PDF if needed, but usually I’d copy and paste directly into the online application. OmmWrite provides a critical function…it counts both words and characters so that you can stay within those restrictions if they exist. In our applications they did…and I spent considerable time editing the Other People’s stuff. Death to adverbs!
Numbers on the Mac, Excel on Mac or Windows. Both create PDFs.
Each contributor is set up as a member of our Slack Team, so it is possible to send direct messages between each other.
We have a single Slack channel called #fundraising where we place all of the items that we have under discussion. If I had to do this again, with simultaneous applications, I might consider creating one channel for each grant application, however we shared a lot of data between the two applications as they were from the same funder.
The core team members are members of #fundraising. The rest of our non-profit board are also members but weren’t active during the creation process. Obviously, anything published in #fundraising is “public” or open for inspection to the team and the members.
Grant Slave (GS) establishes account with the funder’s system, and downloads a PDF of the blank application.
GS posts the blank application to Slack in #fundraising.
Discussion within #fundraising, about who takes what for the writing.
As BR and NG prepare their text files, GS starts filling in the online application with the routine stuff; name and address of the our organization, our mission, etc. .
As the application becomes filled in, it gets printed to PDF and the PDF is posted in the #fundraising channel.
Team members view the PDF from within Slack and make suggestions for changes. They also post their new text in the channel. This is easiest if it is posted as a simple Slack message, as opposed to a Slack snippet or Slack post.
GS enters updated text in the online application, usually by copying and pasting text that the others have provided in #fundraising.
Iterate. As each new version of the application PDF is generated, it gets posted to #fundraising and the earlier versions are deleted. The idea here is that people are always looking at the most recent version of the application PDF.
Note a couple things:
I was recently Debbie Downer during a discussion of grantwriting on commission. My position was that it is considered unethical by foundations, grantwriters, funders etc. for several reasons:
For further background, The NonProfit Times did a very nice article articulating these arguments.
tfnp 