Today, most grantseekers are familiar with the Federal Electronic Grants Clearinghouse, better known by its URL, Grants.gov. You may not know that when it was launched, the portal represented nearly ten years of work by federal officials, often volunteers working with no budget and extremely limited support.

Across the U.S., private foundations are experiencing an ever-increasing demand for grant funding.  Unfortunately, for many of these agencies, the supply of funding has diminished in recent years. Among hundreds or even thousands of unsolicited grant proposals, few new applicants are able to close the deal by receiving an award. Despite this bleak reality, there are several steps your organization can take to strengthen your approach to foundation funding and increase your likelihood of being among the elite organizations awarded with grant support.

While each grant proposal will have its own set of specific guidelines and required supporting documents, grant writers can save a lot of time (and probably spare some headaches) by maintaining a "Frequently Used" file of the most commonly-requested supporting documents and materials. Depending on the type of programs to which your organization typically applies for funding, your list may vary from the one below.  However, determining which documents to file and keeping the files up to date can smooth out the proposal development process for several different grants and, if you find yourself pinched for time, can mean the difference between a high-quality, successful submission and an unsatisfactory or incomplete proposal.

The decision to submit a grant application frequently stems from a combination of an organization's needs, broader goals, and the opening of a suitable grant program.  However, once pen hits paper, these broader ideas must be fully examined and expressed in terms of specific goals that can be carried out and evaluated for success.  One critical element of almost any grant program that can sometimes prove to be a sticking point is the identification of the proposed project's targeted population—in other words, who will benefit from the grant project.  Your target population will likely be initially determined by your organization's current patients, students, community members, or other groups currently served, and by the parameters set out in the grant guidance. However, it is important to dig deeper and iron out specific details related to the target recipients of the project's services. By treating this facet of the application as an opportunity to demonstrate your project's readiness and anticipated effectiveness, you can strengthen your proposal's competitiveness and gain a favorable review from the granting agency.  While developing specific details about your project's implementation can be difficult in the beginning stages of conception, it is well worth the extra effort.

With the U.S. Government's increasing focus on streamlining resources and engaging in whole-community and regional approaches to education, law enforcement, and healthcare, collaboration is a critical component of several federal grant programs.  Many organizations are already engaged in valuable and mutually beneficial collaborative projects that fit seamlessly within the guidelines of the grant to which they're applying for funding.  However, sometimes a grant's requirements might lead you down a new path of collaboration.  While there are obvious benefits to working with other organizations to accomplish a project—additional personnel and support, additional resources, broader project impact—there can also be pitfalls that result from miscommunication, different organizational objectives, and the failure of one or more partners to fulfill their responsibilities, all of which can threaten the success of the project.  There are several steps you can take in the beginning to ensure that your collaborative efforts will be more likely to result in a successful project period, increasing your likelihood of building on a successful partnership and receiving future grant awards for continued impact in your community.

At least once a day someone will ask me to provide them some tips and strategies to improve their grantseeking efforts. As simple as the request sounds, it actually is a very difficult one to address. Volume is not the issue, as there are reams of information that can be provided to organizations seeking to maximize the potential of grant funding. Unfortunately, this may be an instance where the right answers are being provided but the wrong question has been asked. In other words, the problem is that when folks are seeking information at such a high and unspecified level, they usually don' t know where to start. When organizations are just getting their feet wet with grants, information overload may have the reverse effect of intimidating involved staff members to the point where they become discouraged with grant funding mechanisms and throw in the towel. This article is intended for those organizations that may be asking the wrong question and really want some feedback on where to begin.

The start of the new year means big business for gyms and fitness clubs as overstuffed holiday revelers seek to atone for their overindulgence by resolving to get in shape and lose those extra pounds. Whether or not this year's flock will stick with their goals remains to be seen, but the beginning of the year is also a great time to think about getting your grant-seeking program in shape. Whether you have yet to embark on a quest for grant funding or are a weather-beaten veteran of the process, take this opportunity to rethink your strategies, or develop an entirely new one, and make 2012 your most successful grants year yet.

The underlying power of the internet has always been the connection of ideas and people without regard to temporal, physical, social, or other common restraints. Through this communicative ease provided by the internet, crowd-sourcing is becoming a prominent feature in many aspects of our lives. Crowd-sourcing is essentially the enabling of a mass collaboration of individuals to contribute to a task normally reserved for one individual or a set number of individuals. The most prominent example to date is Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia open to contributions and edits from anyone who chooses to participate.

September can be an important marker for a lot of yearly transitions - students from kindergarten to graduate school return to the classroom, Fall begins, Monday night Football returns. However, for public agencies and nonprofit organizations, it should also herald the start to a new season of grantseeking.

The United States currently faces twin economic challenges - growing the national economy (more specifically, lowering the unemployment rate) and shrinking the national debt. However, if you were to listen solely to the rhetoric and heated exchanges taking place in Washington, you could be forgiven for thinking our only problem is debt, debt, and more debt. The over 14 million individuals who remain without a job have become a tangential issue to the ongoing debate over debt.

From one of the more memorable movie scenes of the past 20 years, you may recall a phone conversation between Tom Cruise and Cuba Gooding, Jr. that portrays the amusing contract negotiation of an agent and one of the professional sports figures he manages. A repeated and emphatic shouting of “Show me the money!” helped endear Jerry McGuire to movie viewers and helped Cruise’s character succeed in achieving his intended task—the movie scene ends with Cruise receiving a simply stated, “Congratulations, you’re still my agent,” from his star-in-the-making. It’s not necessarily the aggressiveness of the message itself but rather its impassioned delivery that may best carry over to grant applications.

By Susannah Mayhall
June 2010 (GO Know)

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 infused an unprecedented sum of public funding into the struggling American economy, making over $700 billion available for education, healthcare, public safety, and more. The Recovery Act bolstered support for new initiatives such as broadband infrastructure and energy efficiency. These massive amounts of funding produced a flurry of interest from various private sector industries, all hoping to become involved and receive their share of the stimulus.