5 Grantwriting Tips

This is an eHow video tip on How to Start Your Own Grant Proposal Writing Business. You can find other no-cost video tutorials and webinars by other companies.

Determine your destination before you start. Where would you like to be in three years in your grantwriting career? Maybe after you've won seven grants, you'll consider doing grantwriting for others.

Do you have what it takes to accomplish your mission? Are you the best nonprofit to do it? The grantmaker will want to know how you are unique among your competitors. Is it your "dream team"? Is it your social network? Is it your past successes?

A proposal is like a business presentation. Do research on your competitors. If you don't think you can beat them, do they want to partner with you in an aspect of your mission. Yes, that's when you can't beat them in an area seek to join them. Be warned. Not all nonprofits are collaborative though it is the sector mantra. If there are no takers, ban together with associations, small businesses, big business' charitable arms, and key opinion leaders in social media.

Find out who potential allies and competitors are by checking out LinkedIn groups, Twitter and Facebook. Adapt. As you do research, you may discover a competitive advantage that you have over anyone else. Bingo! That's your selling point that answers, "why you?"

Grantmakers are foundations who are offer financial support towards a cause. Does your mission fit with the foundation's goals this year? These are the groups that receive and evaluate your grant proposal. One such foundation database is Foundation Center. There are other directories but this is one that I used in the past. Almost all such directories require a paid subscription. For example, Foundation Center charges about $19 per month for one user of its database. Comparison shop to find the directory most relevant to your mission and decide if you want one or more employees to use the same subscription.

The usual parts of a grant include:

An Executive Summary
An Origins Narrative
Staff Biographies

Key Success Indicators
Unique Value Proposition

Budget
Past Successes

In business school, students use SMART as an acronym to guide their writing of a mission statement. Is it simple? Is it measurable? Is it attainable? Is it realistic? Is it time-sensitive? This applies to articulating your nonprofit's mission statement to grantmakers too.

Can you say your aim in two sentences? If not, then maybe you need to clarify your objective internally. How? Talk into a digital recorder, video record yourself doing a 3 minute introduction. What is unclear about your objective and subgoals when you speak aloud? Fill in those gaps and you'll have a better pitch and a better honed mission to execute.

This will answer the grantmaker's questions: who are you, what are you trying to accomplish, what population do you plan to serve, where will you do outreach, and what is your vehicle to accomplish such goals.

It is a best practice to send out a query before you write a full grant proposal to confirm that you've identified the right foundation match. In other words, you want to verify that the grantmaker is interested in your one-pager before you invest in a 5-page targeted proposal for their judging panel.

Know that you will also need to be sensitive to more than one deadline for pieces of your grant application. Pay attention to dates mentioned in the foundation directory and the grantmaker's webpage. Take a look at when funds were awarded in previous years. This will give you a better idea of which grantmakers to target and when in your own proposal writing cycle. Another good tip? Use a GANTT chart to plan your research phase, writing weeks and editing days to meet the deadlines.

Refer to the common sections of any grant proposal. First, gather all the evidence of success or potential victory that you can. This means to take the following steps: recruit a "dream team" of dedicated staffers with complementary skill sets, use pro bono experts to put together a cost analysis to create a budget to accomplish your goals, and profile a target demographic that you can assist in an unique way in a realistic time-frame.

Second, you may want to use a no-cost workflow management software such as GoogleDocs to avoid sharing violations when more than one person on your grantwriting team wants to access drafts, add to budget tables, or revise staffer biographies. Third, organize physical receipts, letters of appreciation, awards so that they are ready to reference when it is time to show your track record of results as a compelling argument of future success as a nonprofit.

For a sample grant proposal, step-by-step, visit again for future lenses.