Five Steps to Demystifying and Impacting the Grant Decision Making Process - Part I: The Mission

When you are new to the world of grant writing, it can seem like a strange and mysterious place. Even if you don’t consider yourself a rookie, the power imbalance inherent in our relationships with grant makers has most of us firmly outside the rooms where funding decisions are made. It’s important to demystify as much of the grant making process as possible so that we can determine what aspects of the grant making decision we have some control over and create applications based on this knowledge.

While there are many factors involved in the grant making decision process, over the past 25 years, I’ve created a short list of some of the more obvious factors that go into grant making decisions – and how we can make an impact on these decisions.

1. The mission of the funder. The mission of a funder can be very specific or exceedingly general. If the funder’s mission is general, it can be reinterpreted over time, depending on the values and goals of the board and staff of the foundation, as well as the perceived needs of the community.

Can we impact the mission of a foundation or corporate funder? Not in the way you might think, but the great news is this: the impact of the funder's mission on whether or not to fund YOUR grant application can be controlled to a certain extent by the quality of your proposal. Here’s how:

Make sure you thoroughly understand the mission of the funder, what they specifically fund and where they fund. Make sure you fully qualify them as a prospect (if you’ve been receiving my emails you know how to do this already). This is the first step to aligning your mission and services to the mission of the funder and increasing your chances of being funded.

As always, you need to make it easy for the grant reviewer to draw a parallel between their mission and yours. Some easy ways to do this include:

1. In the cover letter, use language that leads the reviewer to make this connection by writing, for example, "like the (name of the foundation), the (name of your agency) is focused on (matching mission).
2. Carefully and strategically use wording from their mission and focus in the description of your organization if it makes sense to do so. Beware of rewriting your mission to fit with the funder's just to secure funding!
3. When writing your problem statement, highlight problems that your agency works on that are aligned with the foundation's mission. Again, make sure you are doing this with integrity.
4. When sharing a client story, choose one that you know the funder would be proud to share as an example of their impact in the community.

This week and next I'm sharing some tips on how to impact the mysterious world of grant decision making in a five-part series. Follow along here on LinkedIn or on The Fundraising Lab's Facebook page to read the entire series. You can also have these articles delivered right to your email by getting on my email list at www.yourfundraisinglab.com.