answered by the time they leave. These questions are: 1) How do I get the money for my program? 2) How do I keep getting the money for my program? Getting the money really starts with setting up a good program. However your program will not generate the money that you need to stay afloat until you develop good grant proposals.
You think that you don’t have the time. But there is a real benefit to learning how to develop your own winning grant proposal. You learn the discipline needed to launch social services to impact your community. And you also make the connections with the donors for yourself. Ultimately learning for yourself will save you a lot of time- and money.
You are the visionary and your vision is what should be represented in your proposal. Donors should not get a document that represents your administrator’s, secretary’s or even a grant writer’s interpretation of your vision. You need to learn for yourself so that your idea is given without compromise.
The two greatest challenges to writing grant proposals are getting organized and getting started. If you begin with the basics, you will not feel so overwhelmed. First you need to understand the reason for writing a grant proposal. Grants are funds awarded in response to a detailed plan to accomplish something. This detailed plan is called a grant proposal.
Professional grant writers who are writing grant proposals for others need to uncover specialized experiences with their clients. Documenting all qualifying experience will come in handy to validate the requestor’s ability to execute the proposed project. This is true for Foundation grants as well as government grants.
The first section of your grant proposal is setting the tone for proving your case regarding the reasons your project should get the money that you are requesting. Today’s donors are weary of people simply asking for money when they are not even interested in the cause that they have written about in the proposal.
Clients and community stakeholders are also becoming more vocal regarding their distaste for grant recipients who show no apparent concern for their issues.
Although you might think that no one really knows the difference, skilled grant reviewers can discern a lack of experience from a grant proposal. One big indicator of lacking experience is how many words are used to discuss the cause while giving too few examples of efforts to address the cause. We used to do this in our high school essay papers when we did not know the answer. We would just write whatever we thought that we knew about a topic, hoping to get credit for putting lots of information on paper.
How to Prove Your Expertise
There are a number of ways to prove your expertise in an area. However I recommend a simple and inexpensive method to begin. Start a blog or two concerning your area of interest. This could even include some aspects of your proposal. Make sure that your wording is original. Then post this information with any number of online writing resources. One of the resources that I contribute to is Hellium.com.* However there are many others. Some even offer compensation for well written articles.
Your grant proposal needs to tell the reader that you are an expert in your area of interest. Write a few articles about your experience in your chosen field. Even include people that you have serviced informally. Remember that you are the expert.
(This is taken from the book "My Grant Writing Secrets, by Dr. Margaret Jamal, available at Amazon.com and select bookstores.
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