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https://www.wiley.com/Grant+Writing+For+Dummies%2C+7th+Edition-p-9781119868071
Beverly A. Browning
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Published:
March 29, 2022

Grant Writing For Dummies

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Overview

Write award-winning grant proposals that build organizational capacity!

For nonprofit and for-profit firms alike, grants can be a singular generator of growth and impact. But many leaders are intimidated and confused by the sometimes-complex grant application process. The truth, however, is that anyone can learn to write and send a powerful grant letter with the right help.

In Grant Writing For Dummies, Dr. Beverly Browning draws on over four decades of experience writing grant applications and training grant writers to deliver a comprehensive and easy-to-follow roadmap to drafting and submitting grant applications that get funded. You’ll learn to craft the strongest application possible, find the best sources of funding from online databases, and present a realistic project budget plan.

You’ll also find:

  • Example types of funding requests that demonstrate how to apply the concepts discussed in the book
  • New and updated material walking you through the entire grant-writing process, from beginning to end
  • Writing techniques that capture the imaginations of grant reviewers who decide which applicants walk away empty-handed and which ones receive cash

Whether you’re looking to fund your nonprofit, grow your business, or develop your research venture, you’ll find the guidance you need in Grant Writing For Dummies.

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About The Author

DR.BEVERLY BROWNING, MPA, DBA (PHOENIX, AZ) is a grant writing superstar! Browning has worked as a consultant in this space for more than 40 years. She teaches online courses, publishes on grant writing, and manages a non-profit foundation. She is the author of all previous editions of Grant Writing For Dummies.

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grant writing for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

Building your grant seeking and grant writing skills is the best way to secure funding for your organization. The keys to finding grant funding opportunities and writing award-winning grant proposals are knowing where to find opportunities and understanding what funders want to read.In terms of your professional development as a grant writer, it also helps to know how to document your productivity and impact.
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Articles from
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Today, e-grants are the norm for most funders. Unfortunately, grant writers and others working in e-grant limitations tend to have the misconception that e-grants are a piece of cake. The reality is that e-grants aren’t easy to write.Here are some tips to stay on top of the e-grants game and reduce common errors (and stress!
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You can always improve at grant writing Here, you find ten great tips on how to continue building your grant-writing skills. All the advice here comes from the school of hard rocks and hard knocks. Take on new challenges How many times have you looked at a grant application and said to yourself, “No way. I can’t do this!
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Before you get down to business writing grant requests, you first have to search for and qualify potential grant funding opportunities. Knowing who's funding your type of organization, who's funding in or near your location, and the range of their grant awards (past and present) is critical. Following are several tips that can help you zero in on the right opportunity quickly: Sit down with your work associates and ask these questions: Who are our corporate vendors?
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You can find myriad grant research websites these days, both free and subscription-based. If you are seeking a grant, have a look at one of the following sites: eCivis Grants Network: This is a subscription-based service with profiles for public and private sector funders. The Foundation Center: This subscription-based service for private-sector funders offers several newsletters, including Philanthropy News Digest.
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To make your grant writing stand out from other proposals and get your grant funded, you have to know how to write grant applications effectively. Do some research for your specific grant proposal and incorporate the following guidelines to spin written magic: Use a storytelling approach (with supporting statistics) in such a compelling way that the reader can't put down your application until she makes a positive funding decision.
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Some grants exist, both nationally and internationally, that can help you jump-start your new business. Where are they, and how the heck do you find them? Start by typing business plan competitions into your favorite search engine. If you didn’t already feel that the demands of a startup were overwhelming, you definitely will when seeking grant funding.
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When you first submit a grant application to a federal agency for funding consideration, your application goes through a technical review process (or simply pre-review). This pre-review includes checking to see whether you’ve completed and signed all the required forms. The pre-review process also verifies your compliance with formatting instructions and checks the page length of your narrative and all other documents.
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Program officers from local foundations are usually more than willing to discuss the reasons a grant proposal was denied. However, some foundations and corporations that fund throughout the nation explicitly state that due to the volume of grant applications anticipated, they won’t provide feedback on declined applications.
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Searching or applying for federal grant monies without emailing or calling staff at your elected legislators’ offices doesn’t make much sense. Getting to know these critical contacts on Capitol Hill and in your state capital can make the difference between finding out about funding opportunities before NOFAs are published and hearing about them with everyone else.
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According to the website for the Foundation Center, the nation’s leading print and online authority on philanthropy, roughly 10,000 grant makers help with paying off education or artistic or research projects. To make this vast database work for you, you first need to get acquainted with the various types of grants available for individuals.
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Although the nonprofit Foundation Center tends to be the preferred database because of the size of its grant maker and grant-making collection, you can use other online funding resources. Here’s a brief list of other great databases, free and subscription-based: eCivis.com: The eCivis.com database, designed for units of municipal government, is the an all-in-one database with extensive profiles for federal, state, foundation, and corporate grant makers.
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Building your grant seeking and grant writing skills is the best way to secure funding for your organization. The keys to finding grant funding opportunities and writing award-winning grant proposals are knowing where to find opportunities and understanding what funders want to read.In terms of your professional development as a grant writer, it also helps to know how to document your productivity and impact.
Read More
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There are many ways to improve your grant writing. Think about the lasting impact of the funder’s investment. Use words and phrases such as external, internal, local fundraising, creating future funding partners, inviting more external funding sources to the organization’s table of partners, seeking to identify more investors in our stakeholders, and continuing grant-funded activities after the funding is gone.
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Suppose you’ve applied for grants with 20 potential funding sources. One of the 20 funding sources funds you in full. The money has been deposited, and your project is up and running. But more mail comes in, and guess what? Your project has received two more grants, totaling an amount equal to the full funding request.
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If your organization is a new nonprofit, you can increase your chances of winning a grant award by applying through a fiscal sponsor. A fiscal sponsor is usually a veteran agency with a long and successful track record in winning and managing grants; of course, the sponsor must have 501(c)(3) nonprofit status awarded by the IRS.
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Prepare, prepare, prepare! If you don’t prepare and cultivate the relationship before asking for grant money, you and your organization have a double loss when it comes to winning grants from newly identified potential funders.In order to build a relationship with a potential funder, you need to start by researching corporate funding sources thoroughly.
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Conducting a thorough Internet search is the best way to find private-sector grant-funding opportunities. Don’t overlook the importance of reading grant research database funder profiles (which provide an overview of what they fund, how to make the initial contact, and whom to contact) and then searching the Internet for every bit of information you can find on each funder before you email, write, or call its office.
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Before you start writing your grant application narrative, here’s an insider secret about how to connect mentally and skill-wise to the peer review process: You can search for and sign up to become a government peer reviewer, also known as a grant reader. Yes, you! Simply type call for peer reviewer into your favorite search engine or look directly on the federal funding agency’s website.
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Your grant guidelines may call for your partnership information to appear at the beginning of the narrative, before the history and accomplishments. However, the partnerships can just as easily be placed after the statement of needs or as an attachment. Read your grant application directions carefully before you start writing.
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You have multiple options for storing your grant application’s electronic files. Using cloud-based storage services is as secure as printing out your notes and other documents and putting them in a file box for later use. These services are encrypted and easy to access from any mobile device. Some are free up to a maximum storage level; after that, there’s a small fee, which varies from provider to provider.
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Most international grant funders (independent foundations and corporations) insist that you contact them via email or telephone to request their grant application guidelines and forms. Some may query you about your project, asking about location, population served, and what you intend to request from them. Because the foundation landscape in Europe and the rest of the world is varied, the grant eligibility requirements and monetary differences from one country to the next also differ, making adherence to the procedures laid out by each foundation crucial.
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Completing a project budget for a grant application can be an individual effort or a team effort. Either way you go about it, however, developing thorough and accurate project budgets to present to funders involves more than just putting numbers down in a line and adding them together. Many factors affect how much you ask for in grant funding.
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In federal grants, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) works cooperatively with funding agencies to establish government-wide grant management policies and guidelines. These guidelines are published in circulars and common rules. At the federal level, these documents are first introduced in the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA).
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You probably know a lot about the population you want to serve with your hoped-for grant monies. And if you’re at the grant-writing stage for a program, you’re probably pretty well versed in what you want to accomplish and how you plan to go about putting the program in place. But to write an award-winning application, you need to beef up your facts with even more facts.
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If you’re in disbelief about the narrow field of grants for business startups, go to the US Small Business Administration’s website. There you find this disclaimer under “What the SBA Doesn’t Offer” when it comes to grants: SBA does NOT provide grants for starting and expanding a business. Government grants are funded by your tax dollars and, therefore, require very stringent compliance and reporting measures to ensure the money is well spent.
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Before you write a grant request, you convene your staff, volunteers, community partners, and other interested parties to help your organization develop the plan of action and provide the information for the statement of need. After you turn in your grant request, you need to bring the stakeholders back together for a debriefing in which you pass on key information.
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What is grant management? First, it’s making sure you keep all the promises you wrote in the program design narrative of your grant application. Second, it’s handling all the funder’s reporting requirements. Sometimes the grant writer assumes this responsibility; other times, these tasks are divvied up between the grant program manager or project director and the person who makes the financial decisions for your organization (the CFO or business manager).
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Grant writing can sometimes be overwhelming. A grant-writing management software program allows you to keep track of the entire grant application process, including preplanning steps, partner information, funder information, due dates for fiscal and evaluation reports, and grant closeout. Commercial software programs are available to capture any and all segments of the grant-seeking process.
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After you decide whether to conduct an internal stakeholder or external third-party evaluation, the next step is to start writing or incorporating your evaluation plan into the program design section of the grant application narrative. The evaluation plan goes at the end of the program design narrative if it’s not a stand-alone section.
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