Hello! welcome back! Nonprofit grant writing is just one of the many ways
that your organization can launch or expand your programs, but the grant
writing process can mystify and confuse many people. As a non-profit founder and
executive director myself I've written probably over a hundred grants and
successfully obtained several of those so in this video I want to share with
you five of the most common questions that you might see on a non-profit grant
application or proposal and offer up my tips on how to answer each question if
this is your first time on my channel my name is amber Melanie Smith and as I
mentioned before I am a non-profit founder and current executive director
working full-time for the nonprofit that I founded many years ago and I'm also a
speaker on social impact leadership and service every week I make videos here on
YouTube about how to successfully run a non-profit how to make an impact how to
figure out what your change-making style is where to find volunteer opportunities
basically anything about how to make an impact in this world and the many ways
to do so I am all about helping aspiring changemakers with tips and strategies to
help you make an impact while living a life of purpose so please if this video
helps you out show me some love subscribe to my channel hit that like
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video comes out okay so before I get into the five nonprofit grant writing
questions and tips for those answers I want to just lay the groundwork here and
let you know that there are a couple things that you're gonna need to have
ready and available in order to write any a successful grant it doesn't matter
how awesome of a writer you are you've got to have these things you've got to
have solid programming in place so that people will want to fund it okay so a
couple of the things you're gonna need before you can get started writing a
grant the first thing you're going to need is your annual budget for your
organization the budget that has been approved and
and put together by you and your board of directors the second thing you're
gonna need before you can write a grant is your organization's a strategic plan
this is the plan that lays out the specific outcomes that you want to
achieve for your program so how many people are you gonna help how you're
gonna help them and then shows your plan for working towards those outcomes and
the third thing you really want to have is ideally if your programs been going
for a little while at least a couple months to a year or more you want to
have collected data on the success of your program up until that point this
helps prove that you've got a great program deserving a funding to help
expand it if it's a newer program you at least want to be able to show your
organization's overall success in meeting its goals that might be similar
to what you're trying to do with this program and if you're completely new
then you want to look at your reasons why you think this program will succeed
so maybe something similar that has been tried somewhere else the way they did it
why you think it will work for you as well like I said before grant writing is
honestly about 90% having a solid and successful program and just about 10%
good clear writing if you have a good program the money should follow okay so
let's get into the five common questions that you might see on a grant
application or proposal and my tips on how to answer them the first question
that you are likely to see it's not anything particularly mind-blowing but
that is to provide a mission and vision for your organization and an overview of
maybe your organization's history and how you work you want to make sure that
you have a really really clear mission statement and vision statement and to
know the difference between the two so mission statements more about how you're
going to achieve your vision and your vision statement is answering the
question of view woke up tomorrow and you had changed the world the way you
wanted to what does the world look like now so something like our vision is to
create a world without homelessness that's pretty compelling
so using that same example if your vision statement is we would like to
help create a world without homeless than your mission which again
articulates how you're going to do that could read something like we are going
to create a world without homelessness by ensuring that everyone in our town
has access to affordable housing so you also might have a little bit of room in
this section of your grant application to relate further to the funder so what
I typically like to do is read through the foundation or funders website learn
what kind of words they like to use what kinds of concepts they like to explore
and if possible and if I can do it without you know bending my mission or
or making it seem like I'm straying from my focus I will make an effort to
include some of the same words that they use in my words because that shows them
that you're paying attention and might help trigger something in their brain
about how you might be a good fit for them the second very common question
that you might see on a grant application is how does your program
work you want to be very clear and specific and concise in your answer to
this question it's very tempting especially for those of us who might
have a background in creative writing such as myself to kind of be a little
bit flowery in our language here and try to be overly inspirational and get them
excited that way but funders are reading dozens or hundreds of applications they
don't got time for that so we want to make sure that we are answering their
questions in clear concise ways as often as possible so I would recommend for
answering this question is just laying out the steps of how your program works
step by step for example my organization that I run has a summer teen camp every
year where we teach teens about leadership and service in the community
and whenever I'm applying for a grant to support this program I will lay out the
process of what the teens will experience during the summer camp how we
go about recruiting and finding the teens to participate and how we are you
know knowing if the program is a success which is also something we can answer
later in the grant application depending on the funder so it might look something
like this first we outreach to fellow nonprofits
in the community who serve teens to let them know that we have space available
in our camp then the teens register and enroll and we send them all information
they need we get their parents oriented to help the camp works they come to the
camp they learn from different nonprofit leaders on how to develop their own idea
for social impact projects they participate in different service
projects every day and then they design their own idea of her social impact
project and hone that idea throughout the week so that is an overview and very
specific clear steps on how the program works
part of this section of explaining higher program works
has to relate back to your mission and vision as an organization so you want to
make sure that there's a clear correlation and that you're not just
describing a program that has no logical connection to the mission of your
organization so for the example of the teen summer camp that my organization
runs well my organization's mission is to inspire a culture of volunteerism and
helping others so by having teens come through the summer camp we can give them
that training on how to lead positive change in their community so I can
connect the two that way so you want to make sure that you can clearly
articulate why your program has to do with meeting the overall mission and
goals of your entire organization the third common question on grant proposals
often trips people up and that is how will you measure success so oftentimes
funders are just looking for your literal explanation of the tools that
you're going to use so how are you literally going to measure success of
course to know how to measure success you need to know what success looks like
for your organization organization and that will get us into the fourth
question I'll talk about here in a minute but in the example of this summer
teen camp that my organization runs we measure success through before and after
surveys because the outcome that we're looking for is how did the teens
attitudes and understanding and confidence and knowledge about their
community how did it change from the beginning of the camp to the end of the
hamp so we take a survey at the beginning to get a baseline and we take
a survey at the end to measure the difference between the two so our
literal tool and how we are measuring success is through a survey that
measures those things now other tools could include getting community
testimonials it could be other types of survey it could be research study could
be collecting anecdotes there are a lot of different ways to measure success
you're gonna want to make sure that the way that you identify is the appropriate
way for tracking the outcomes you're looking to achieve for your program and
also a way that you can feasibly execute and afford because research studies are
not cheap now the fourth question that I just alluded to is what are your
expected outcomes for your program specifically usually for the period of
time that you are seeking funding for so a lot of foundations will fund you for
one year for this program or a part of that year or some will offer multi-year
grants so you're talking about your specific expected outcomes for the
period of time that you are receiving that funders funding now what is an
outcome often people will confuse an outcome with an output but these are
different things an output is some quantity of a service or product or item
that you have resulting from your efforts so let's say you run a soup
kitchen yeah an output for you would be the number of meals you have served that
is your output that is the number of things you have produced through your
work and outcome however is how you changed something from this status quo
so in the example I mentioned at the beginning of a mission and vision of
ending homelessness in the city an output might be how many people you have
placed in homes in a year but an outcome would be how many of those people stayed
out of the cycle of homelessness for the next five or ten years because that
proves that you were able to completely change their lives for the better
it wasn't just you know now they have a home and great our work is done but the
sustainability of that you know how how did having a home change them how did it
allow them to change their whole life and be sustainable in their lives so
outcome it's how you change something from the status quo using my teen camp
example that changed attitudes and knowledge and confidence and wisdom
about their community from the beginning to the end of the program so you want to
be thinking about how are you actually changing lives not just the number of
something that you're producing and in terms of how to articulate an outcome it
will usually read something like this by the end of this funding period the
number of students graduating from high school as a result of our programs will
increase from 50 percent to 75 percent so you see what I did I described how we
had a status quo that 50 percent then the program intervened and it changed
lives and as a result now 75 percent of students will graduate so if you have
that in mind just to revisit the previous common question of how will you
measure results you can align how you'll measure results with the outcomes that
you are looking to achieve so in the example of having more students being
able to graduate from high school you can measure that by simply counting the
increase in the number of students who are graduating from high school who had
some kind of correlation and participation in your program the fifth
most common question that I see on grant proposals and grant applications is how
are you gonna spend our money most funders are going to ask for your annual
budget as well as a separated out budget for your specific program that you are
asking for funding for so that's where those things you need in the beginning
your budget etc are going to come in handy now sadly you can't usually just
say give us the money for all of our program needs and it'll be
you have to specify your intent on how you're going to spend each portion of
the funding that you're requesting so if you are asking for $10,000 explaining
how you're gonna spend three thousand here three thousand there four thousand
somewhere else cetera I've said up to ten the funder will usually lay out what
is an acceptable expense for the money that you're asking for from them on
their website or in their application so just make sure you are thoroughly
reading through that and following their rules that so some funders will not fund
any kind of staff support and some funders only want to support operating
and staff costs whatever the case may be just making sure that you are knowing
what those rules are and following them in your request when you are outlining
what you intend to spend their money on should you receive their grant and
budgeting for that if you don't know the exact cost for something it's probably
okay to provide a good faith estimate you know do your research and provide an
estimate but if the amount that it ends up costing is drastically different you
will need to plan to update your funder later just to be transparent and
accountable my experience is that the best funders are not going to be mad at
you if something is a little different than what you in good faith estimated
you know funders are humans too and they are providing you with the support
because they care about your program and its outcomes and know that sometimes
things evolve and change it's all about being transparent and accountable and
having a conversation with them okay well that's all I got if you have
written grants I'd love to hear from you what are some of the most common or even
the most challenging or mystifying grant questions you've ever seen leave those
in the comments below and perhaps I or someone else who watches one of my
videos can respond and help you out I really hope that this was helpful to you
and that you and this video if you did please again
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