4 Mistakes You May Be Making in Your Grants BEFORE You Write a Word

Grantwriters can lose funding for scads of reasons-but here are 4 completely avoidable ones you may be making before you even begin to write a single word.

• Assuming your organization can “handle” winning a grant
• Searching for funding in an unsystematic way
• Sending proposals to funders who aren’t likely to be interested in your ideas
• Jumping into writing the proposal before repeatedly reading the entire RFP

Assuming Your Organization Can “Handle” Winning a Grant

A colleague, one of the best grant proposal writers I’ve ever known, once wrote a pro bono federal grant that scored 100% of the available points. But it was a huge mistake.

Sam (not the real name) presented a picture of an incredible need, posed a solution that a government body was eager to fund, and was helping to implement the process. What Sam soon realized is that the agency (a very small grassroots organization) was not prepared with the appropriate infrastructure. Internal fiscal controls were nonexistent; client files were stored hither and yon.

After federal officials did a field site visit, the funding was taken away. The officials determined the funds could not be adequately tracked and lacked confidence in the Board to conduct adequate oversight.

Lesson Learned: If your organization can’t yet pass muster in your governance structure and fiscal capacity, it’s better to not write the proposal.

Searching for Grants in an Unsystematic Way

Grant funding has always been inadequate to meet the needs in our society. Writing proposals has never been as easy as some 2-hour workshop makes you think it might be.

If you go about looking for funding opportunities based on whatever you come across in your spare time, with no plan, you will likely be wasting your time.

Sure, gold miners sometimes found nuggets walking beside a creek, but the ones who did well understood the terrain and keys to finding the valuable veins. They also knew how to pan, mine, and assay their fines. Luck usually played only a small part of any success.

It’s the same with choosing which grant opportunities to go after. You need a clear strategy, deep understanding of resources, and facility with using available tools.

Lesson Learned: Put together a funding search plan before you write any proposal. You’ll be more focused and likely to “strike it rich” than randomly picking up rocks.

Sending Proposals to Organizations Who Aren’t Likely to be Interested in Your Ideas

Don’t you hate it when you shop and a salesperson shows you things you have no interest in looking at, much less buying? Even after you describe in detail what you want? It may leave you frustrated and cause you to avoid that store altogether.

The same happens with foundations (less so government grants). If you want your ideas to receive funding, you need to make sure that you can link what you want to accomplish with what the stated guidelines and priorities of the funder are.

Lesson Learned: If you can’t (or don’t) find an interested source of money, you will not receive funding, no matter how good your ideas are in some “objective” way. That’s not what the funder is buying. Only approach funders who are likely to want to learn more.

Jumping into Writing the Proposal Before Repeatedly Reading the Entire Request for Proposals

The adult learners (usually graduate students at the Masters and Ph.D. level) I work with hate to read the entire RFP when I first work with them.

Who can blame them? Running 40–70 pages in length, often dry as sand, redundant, and poorly organized, requests for proposals are hardly anyone’s favored reading material.

The thing is, it only takes skipping one or two sentences from the entire document to miss something that can blow your proposal out of the water.

Did you forget to certify that your organization won’t discriminate against protected classes of people? You’re no longer a contender.

Does your proposal use an approach that isn’t in the approved list of programs? Again, your time is wasted when the reviewers realized that.

Lesson Learned: Reading RFPs may not be easy, but it is essential.

So many ways to NOT get funding exist, you need to guard against the ones that are easy to avoid. These are four that you can easily avoid. For your organization’s sake, and the future of your clients, you’ll be much more likely to be successful if you take care before you even start writing the proposal.

Originally published at http://richardhoefer.com.

For more on how to actually begin to write a grant proposal for your nonprofit, see this story.