GUEST POST // Grant Writing Essentials: 5 Foundational Tips for Newbies
By Meredith Noble of Learn Grant Writing
Let’s say you’ve just been handed your first grant writing project. Welcome to the club!
With little experience and real grant dollars on the line for your organization, the stakes can feel high. For some grants, competition can be quite fierce.
But have no fear—grant writing is a learnable skill that many nonprofit professionals have mastered. It’s an in-demand skill that drives real impact for organizations, making it not only an asset for your nonprofit to break through funding plateaus but also a great addition to your resume (or the beginning of a lucrative grant writing side hustle).
But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. You can learn all kinds of introductory tricks and steps to help you start your project with confidence. Here are our top recommendations for grant writing newcomers.
1. Understand the Grant Landscape.
To get your bearings, familiarize yourself with the world of grants. There are a few key elements to understand:
Funders, which include various types of foundations, corporate giving offices, and government agencies at the federal, state, and local levels.
Types of grants, which can fall into one of several categories based on whether they offer restricted or unrestricted funding, one-time payments or installments, and flat or matched funding (meaning the grant will provide a set percentage of your proposed project’s total cost, with the rest covered by you or other sources).
Reporting requirements, or how you’ll need to follow up and report progress to the funder. These requirements might be unconditional (minimal requirements), contingent (requiring you to hit specific benchmarks before receiving installments), or reimbursable (in which you’re reimbursed after paying for the project yourself, common for government grants).
As you research grant opportunities, you’ll need to understand these elements so that you can best prioritize them (more on this below). But you’ll also need to know what to expect from the grant proposals themselves.
The parts of a grant proposal will vary depending on each funder’s specific requirements, but they generally include these sections:
An introduction or executive summary
Organizational background of your nonprofit
Statement of need, or a brief explanation of what you need funding for and why
Project description, or a more detailed explanation of how your project will work
Methodology, or how you’ll implement the project once funded
Goals and objectives, including how you’ll gauge the success of your project
A budget for the proposed project and the different funding sources you expect to use
An evaluation plan for how you’ll keep track of the project’s progress and determine its impact
A sustainability plan that explains how you’ll keep the project running once initial funding ends
Most grant applications also ask for additional documentation. These commonly include official Resolutions from your board that will hold your organization to the proposed plans, risk assessments, details about relevant partnerships, letters of support from peer organizations and stakeholders, supplemental research, team member resumes, IRS documents, and your nonprofit’s recent financial statements.
Whew—sounds like a lot, and it can be. However, by knowing what to expect, staying organized, and gathering these documents early, you’ll be able to easily tackle these elements as your proposal takes shape.
2. Choose Your Opportunities Wisely.
Applying for every grant opportunity you see is a recipe for burnout and wasted time. Instead, you should very strategically research and choose the grant opportunities that best align with your needs and that you have the strongest chance of winning.
Platforms like Grants.gov, Candid, GrantStation, and Instrumentl are all reliable sources for finding recent grant opportunities.
Once you gather appealing opportunities, you’ll need to cut down your list. There are two primary criteria to keep in mind:
Alignment. You and the funder need to be on the same page to get their attention and have a strong shot at success. The grant’s intended purpose should align with the project you already have in mind, and your mission should align with the funders’ and their past funded projects.
Competitiveness. How likely are you to win this grant? Consider the funder’s prominence, the generalness (or nicheness) of the grant’s objective, and its dollar value to roughly gauge the amount of attention it’s likely to get from other nonprofits.
Consider your timeframe, as well—how soon do you want to complete your project or launch your program, and how soon do the funders need applications? Go through a few rounds of reviews and trim your list down to just a small handful of the top opportunities that match your timeframe.
3. Have a Grant Writing Plan.
Our most important recommendation for grant writers of any experience level is to use a grant’s guidelines or requirements as the North Star for the writing process. Use them to quite literally create an initial outline, a “narrative skeleton,” to fill in with compelling details and persuasive data. This will keep your writing process on track and ensure that the finished product closely adheres to the funder’s expectations.
After compiling your outline from the grant’s guidelines, you should be able to immediately identify all the additional information and documents you’ll need, like:
A project or program budget (critically important, nail it down early!)
Supplemental documentation
Project-specific plans and projections
Internal and external data about the problem you seek to address and the impact of previous projects and programs
Anecdotes and examples from your constituents and community stakeholders
This information will help you lay out an organized grant writing plan that you can follow. Many sections and details of the proposal will require a finalized budget, and documents that need to be approved by your board can take a while to procure, so start the ball rolling on these elements as early as possible.
4. Be Organized and Communicate Clearly.
It’s highly unlikely you’ll be able to gather all the information you need on your own. More often than not, grant writing is a team effort. To stay organized and focused, there are a few logistical best practices to follow:
Gather everyone who’ll need to be involved in an early kickoff meeting to orient them to the grant, what the application will require, and how they’ll play a role. Prepare and share an agenda in advance.
At the end of your kickoff meeting, establish a follow-up schedule and deadlines that will keep everything moving forward smoothly.
Make sure you’ve got an easy file-sharing process in place so that team members can access and add documents as needed. You’ll likely want to limit edit permissions on the main proposal draft, however.
Consider project management and other organizational essentials. There are platforms tailor-made for keeping grant writing projects organized and that include file sharing tools, but more general platforms like Asana or Trello work well, too.
As the project moves forward, keep communicating clearly. A weekly update email that rounds up progress made and remaining action items and deadlines is an easy way to keep everyone in the loop.
5. Write the Bulk of Your Proposal Quickly.
With the outline and resources in hand, take a fast-and-furious then review-and-revise approach. Aim to write the first draft of your complete proposal in just a day or two.
Remember, momentum is your friend. We’ve seen this strategy work well for countless grant writers because it helps to ensure greater coherence and reduces the overall risk of derailing progress through too much outside input too early. It’s ultimately much easier to trim and polish a complete draft than it is to piece things together and fluff it up later.
Once you have a complete draft, seek feedback from necessary internal stakeholders. Make revisions as needed, and have an objective proofreader screen your proposal one last time for coherence and alignment with the grant’s guidelines.
Give yourself plenty of time to review, refine, and gather any last pieces of data or supplemental documents. Setting a personal deadline a couple of days before the application’s official due date will give you a helpful cushion should anything take longer than planned.
Grant writing is an incredibly valuable skill to have, both for your nonprofit and for you as an individual professional. Learning the ropes through trial and error is certainly worth the effort, but there’s also so much value in learning from those who’ve gone before.
Online grant writing courses are a helpful investment to make if your organization wants to make grant seeking a more consistent priority. If you go this route, prioritize options that provide practical tips and exercises, guidance on writing style, and downloadable resources and templates.
This guest post was written by Meredith Noble.
Meredith Noble is the co-founder of Learn Grant Writing, an online membership for those building their careers in grant writing. Her book, How to Write a Grant: Become a Grant Writing Unicorn, is a bestseller for nonprofit fundraising and grants. Her expertise has been featured in NASDAQ, Forbes, Fast Company, Business Insider, and other top publications. She has secured over $45 million in grant funding, and her students have secured over $627 million - a number that grows daily. If Meredith's not biking or skiing in Alaska, she can be found curled around a steaming cup of green-tea and a good book.
