Getting a grant for a non-profit can be a challenge!
But there are a couple of things that you can do to increase your chances of
getting one. That's what i'm going to talk about in
this video. Welcome back to my channel! My name is Amber Melanie Smith and I
make videos here on youtube about starting a nonprofit, creating a
social impact, social enterprise, and so much more. My goal is to help
aspiring change-makers with tips and strategies to help you
change the world and live a life impact and purpose.
i hope this video will help you out on that journey - if it does please go ahead
and give it a like, and don't forget to subscribe to my
channel for more youtube videos like this. Grants are such a popular
topic in the world of nonprofits but it's
really important that before we begin going down this path
that i give you a little bit of a disclaimer and that is that, despite
common misconception, grants are very competitive.
Grants are pretty hard to get so i want to make sure
that if you are thinking about working to get grants to
fund your nonprofit organization, that you also have some additional
revenue options and you're exploring other revenue streams to help you
get things going and keep things sustainable. And the other thing is
grant funders generally don't want to be your only source of income they don't
want you to rely on them for funding so all of that said here are a couple of
things that i've learned through my own experiences
writing applying for grants and successfully getting some grants
that you can do to increase your odds of getting a grant
the first strategy you can employ to increase your odds of getting a grant
and in fact this applies to all sorts of donation
situations is to try to build a relationship with
the grant maker before you apply for a grant also
working on having a lot of visibility for your cause
getting out there in the community being seen
making sure you're engaging the media and having a good positive
honorable reputation can all help with that relationship building
in my experience it's very difficult to get a grant when you are
cold calling like applying for a grant with someone
you've never talked to before you've never had any kind of interaction with
before because behind every grant institution and grant
foundation are human beings and human beings tend
to need to support those that they trust
that they know that they understand the reputation of
so it's all about building those connections in advance
this is true for me too you know i was looking back through some of the grants
that we've gotten throughout the years and i saw this pattern of
every time we successfully got a grant we had had
some kind of communication with or relationship
with that particular funder beforehand put yourself
in the grant funders shoes would you prefer
to fund someone you know and trust and has a good reputation you've seen
their track record of success or someone that you've never
met before someone that you've never heard of before and you don't really
know fully what they're about even despite
what they put in their grant application all things being equal you'd be more
likely to fund the person that you're more familiar with that you have a more
trusting relationship with and part of this as i mentioned before
is building up visibility for your cause so making sure that you are out there
talking to people in your community regularly that you are
sharing amazing stories with the media regularly trying to engage them to shine
a light on what you're doing all of these things contribute to a
sense of visibility that can only help you get grants
so if you're just starting out and you're new to all of this and you
don't have any relationships with grant funders which
is let's be frank a lot of us then how exactly do you get started
building a relationship with a grant funder here's how you can do that
so the first thing and this is pretty obvious when you hear
me say it out loud is to reach out to the grant foundation and see if you can
have a meeting with their grant officer not to ask for money just to sit down
get to know them learn about the issues they prefer to fund
their preferences the types of causes that they funded in the past
and share more about what you're trying to do share your vision
share your goals and ask this is the key part
ask for their honest feedback because you will learn
so much if you just put it out there and you're saying
here's what we're gonna do here's what we're thinking will work
please we'd love to hear your feedback first of all
people love to give their feedback but second of all
this will give you really valuable information about whether or not that
particular grant funder could potentially be a good fit to fund
you in the future now this won't work with
every grant foundation some are private or family based
foundations and they prefer to keep a lower profile so that they don't get
inundated with requests and in that case it's more about them
finding you in which case the visibility thing helps
but with other types of foundations more established corporate foundations
community foundations generally they want to hear from you
they want to get to know entities and their community
to know about the landscape and who's out there
making a difference now if you meet with these folks and it's a great meeting
and you think there might be something there then you've got to stay in contact
with them every couple of months make sure you're
saying hello check in on what they're up to
share what you are doing share your upcoming initiatives and events
invite them to participate these are all great ways to
continue to build on that relationship once you've had that initial
conversation once you've been building up that relationship for a little while
you can start by asking for really small things like
share this post on social media or come to our event
learn more in depth about what we're doing that gives these
potential funders more in-depth knowledge
and more up-to-date current news about what you're trying to do
and when it is appropriate when that deadline for a grant is coming up
they're going to remember who you are and they're going to have seen it
firsthand and that's going to increase your odds
of getting that grant the second thing you can do to
increase your odds of getting a grant for your nonprofit
is to start building a portfolio of your impact successes
and success stories before you apply for grants
you might even be able to do this before you even get your non-profit status at
all when you set out to start building this
portfolio of impacts and successes you want to be really mindful
of your outcomes and people get confused a lot between
outcomes and outputs but what grant funders are going to care about
is those outcomes an output is some kind of
like product or deliverable that comes out of the service you're providing as a
non-profit for example number of meals served or
pounds of clothing given to children that's an
output but it doesn't really tell you how
you changed your community uh in accurate terms so um if you're providing
a service your goal is to change your community to make an impact
to make the world better than it was before so the outcome
is the difference between where the world
ended up and where it was when you started
if that makes sense an example would be things that
changed so as a result of our programming
um 10 more people said that they would recycle so that's a
change that's a change in this case in behavior but it is representative of
something that is different now that your nonprofit has done some
work than it was before your nonprofit existed
that's what funders care about that's what funders want to fund
so when you go about to start creating this portfolio of impacts and outcomes
make sure that you have a way of measuring things like that it can be a
little difficult and challenging to figure out how to measure something like
how happy are you now that we exist but when you think about it it's not
actually that hard because you could accomplish that particular example with
the survey so put in these mechanisms in place when
you first start a non-profit when you're first
getting things off the ground to be able to measure those impacts and those
outcomes if you have events where you're teaching
people about a topic ask them what they knew at the start of
your your teaching and what they knew at the end of the teaching
that represents the change you want to be able to demonstrate that there's a
change and if you're not making the change that
you thought you were going to make through this programming
these tracking mechanisms these surveys these
databases whatever tool you want to use to track your impact
it can be really helpful to know because you're starting a non-profit
to be able to change your community and if you're not doing that
i mean i would want to know right away so having a survey that tells me i'm not
doing so good of a job in this one area that gives me the information i need to
be able to change it and then i can improve on it and improve on it and
start showing that track record of success
that grant funders are going to care about and then here's what you do
you start building up these impacts these outcomes and you have
really awesome data behind it all of this great gold for
grant applications by the way what you do in your grant application
is you explain how the funding that that grant
could give you will help you grow upon those impacts either
improve them in some way by funding some kind
of tool or staff position or software whatever it may be that you're
requesting funding for the grant money is going to help you
improve on that outcome and it's going to be possible because of
that grant funding that's what funders want to know is how
is me giving you money going to make the work that you're doing bigger better
stronger deeper more impactful whatever it is because if i were a
funder and i were just going to give money to
something that wasn't going to make a difference
in some way to that cause then i would not be so inspired to do
that there is another part of demonstrating
your impact and outcomes that you want to pay attention to
and that is that in addition to all this great data you're collecting through
your tracking mechanisms you also want to be capturing
stories and anecdotes because human beings are really
inspired by stories and as i said before behind every grant foundation is a human
being and i've said this before in other
videos too that statistics are great they're helpful to
show the scale of a problem which you also need to be able to do in
a grant application but stories are what inspire people to
want to support your cause we are human we've been heavily
influenced by stories since the dawn of time
and even grant makers are inspired by stories too
and where your outcomes trackers and your
impacts portfolio will demonstrate how the funding will impact all of the
lives that you want to in a particular way a
story will tell the uniquely human experience of someone
suffering from whatever problem your nonprofit is trying to
solve and connecting that to
the outcomes the grant funders will know that the story of
bob or whomever is the story of all of the people that you're trying to help
and the third and final strategy that i want to talk about
to increase your odds of getting a grant is to make sure
that you are a good fit in the first place
all the other stuff won't matter it won't matter if your
best friends with this grant foundation if you're not a good fit
if you don't align with the issues that they want to fund as
a grant making organization many grant foundations
have constraints about the types of issues and causes
that they can fund from the very beginning so
maybe they are influenced by the donor who gave the foundation the money to
give away in the first place that donor said i only want to fund
causes related to animals or whatever it may be
maybe if it is a corporate foundation it could be
um constrained by the type of industry that the company is in for example if it
is a company that
creates environmentally friendly cleaning supplies and i know
a couple in my local area like that they're probably going to be
interested pretty specifically in causes that relate to
environmental things so conservation helping animals et cetera
so all that is to say that don't waste your
time or the grant foundation's time in trying
to apply for a grant that you're not going to be a good fit
for there are some exceptions where every couple of years maybe the
grant foundation changes what they focus on
or something big happens in the world and the grant foundation decides they
want to focus on that now but in general my experience is that a
foundation will be very very unlikely to fund
outside of the issue areas and causes that they have declared they want to
focus on now it's pretty easy to figure out what those
issue areas are most of the time they will state it on their website
assuming they have a website but uh in the absence of
that you can do the old-fashioned way call them up
try to get that meeting with them and just ask them is my cause
something that your foundation would ever be interested
in supporting and the worst they could say is no and to be honest
if you go after grants you might hear no a bit
but that's okay not everyone's going to be the best fit for you
and you're just going to have to be ready to hear no
get rejected sometimes and keep on going so now i want to hear from you
have you been applying for grants have you gotten any grants
what do you think made that process process successful for you
or what are some of your grant challenges i also want to say and put
out there that i've been thinking about doing some videos where i walk through
actual real grant applications from foundations
that are across the country to talk about how
i would approach writing those specific grants if that
would be of interest of you please let me know in the comments below and if you
have a specific grant foundation that you're interested
in me walking through leave that in the comments below too and i will take a
look and see if that's something that i can do for you
i think it could be really fun to dissect grant foundations grant
applications and talk through my mindset what i would
do if i were the one writing that grant and
maybe it would help you out that's it don't forget to like this video
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challenges and social impact and encouraging one another along the way
i'm amber smith see you next time