About 20% of the time, funders will ask for a couple of letters of support to be uploaded or attached to your grant application. Have these letters prepared in advance, keeping in mind these things: * They must be dated in the same calendar year that you’re applying for funding * They must include specifics on how they support and/or partner with your agency * They can be “To Whom It May Concern”, so one letter can be sent to many funders Here’s a good example of an in-kind p

There was a time when multi-year, federal, state or county grants were the way to go. You could get one of those grants and rest on your laurels for a while as long as you didn’t upset the applecart. Those days are gone. Any of you who manage a government grant or work under one know that you spend as much time documenting and reporting every little detail as you spend on the program itself. Sure, some government grants offer lots of money…..but weigh it against all of the bu

Organizations make a mountain out of a mole hill when it comes to producing a budget. Sometimes, I get an Excel spreadsheet with 18 tabs, detailing each time they buy paper towels for the office bathroom. Other times, I have to produce a budget for a client....even some with $500,000 budgets. A Budget, for grant purposes, needs to be a QuickBooks (or similar software) one page budget, listing Revenues and Expenses projected for the current fiscal year. Keep in mind that yo

"Oh my, we can't have a young person on our board!" " They are in school when we have our meetings." " We deal with confidential information and youth may not understand how we do things." Baloney. I've heard it all as a grant writer. Here's the truth. The only reason you don't have a high school student or college student on your Board of Directors is because you don't want to engage young people. That hurts, huh? If you can list a student on your board, your grant chanc