Create the Most Efficient Bill Making Format for NPOs

Bill making format for NPOs

welcome back in this video i'm going to do a step-by-step walkthrough showing how i would approach applying for a real life non-profit grant for those of you who've been watching my videos for a while and seen several of my past videos you might know that i promised to do this walk through several videos back well i'm excited to say the day is finally here and i hope that you enjoy this for those of you unfamiliar hello my name is amber melanie smith i am a non-profit founder and executive director and i love sharing everything that i've learned on my journey to make an impact through the nonprofit world here on youtube i have probably applied for at least 100 grants in my lifetime i have won some i've lost some and i've generally learned a lot from the process which i'm excited to share with you today i hope that you find this useful if you do please don't forget to give it a like and subscribe to my channel for more videos like this and don't forget to ring the bell so you can get alerts when i post my next video so in a minute here i'm going to show you the particular website of the grant foundation i've chosen to walk through with you today but before i get to that i just want to talk through a couple of things that are important to know about applying for grants as a non-profit organization the first thing to understand is that the word grants refers to a lot of different things in the nonprofit world you've got corporate grants you've got private or family foundation grants you've got community foundation grants you've got government grants there are all sorts of different types of grants if you're interested in learning more about the different types of grants and how they work and how you might find them i've got another great video on that topic called six types of grants for non-profits be sure to check that out now for this particular video and i hope that this will be the first of many grant walk through videos in the future if you like this i will be doing a walk through of how i would hypothetically approach applying for a grant through the max and victoria dreyfus foundation now this isn't one of your big global famous foundations like the bill and melinda gates foundation or something like that from what i can tell this is a smaller private family foundation with headquarters in washington dc in the united states and they say that they make grants to organizations across the country in my opinion going after one of these smaller foundations is a good move because you will probably face a little bit less competition in applying for these grants than you might face if you are trying to get a grant from a big famous global foundation like bill and melinda gates foundation though full disclaimer grants in general you've got to know are pretty competitive and i always say i recommend nonprofits find other avenues to generate revenue and funding for their work do not rely on grants it is very unlikely that you will be able to get a significant portion of the money you need to operate from grants alone so just consider grants one of many potential revenue streams so i'm about to get into showing you this grant foundation's website and their criteria and talk through how i would approach applying for a grant from this particular foundation i'm going to talk through first what information i'm able to gather from their website about how they operate second i'll talk through what their particular grant requirements are and why it's so important to adhere to those guidelines to complete accuracy if you can and third i'll talk through what my personal strategy would be to write the grant proposal for this foundation keep in mind there's no single solution there's no single best way to write a grant so this is how i would approach it from my perspective and from my experiences and i hope that you're able to learn something from it okay so let's dive in okay so i am here on the website of the max and victoria dreyfus foundation i found this particular grant through a grants database website you can search for grants just using typical internet search terms grants for non-profits tackling x issue in abc city so you can do that you can you can look through guidestar there are a lot of other ways you can find grants so you know you want to think about what your search terms are based on the issue your nonprofit is tackling and the geographical service area that you're going to be serving in order to find grants that might be a good fit for you so the first thing i'm going to do is talk through some initial impressions on this website it's a fairly simple website pretty straightforward you know not that i've heard of every grant foundation ever but as i mentioned before um i think this is probably a smaller family foundation just by the looks of um the website how you know it's it's very simple very bare bones so most likely a lesser known family private family foundation talking through who what type of non-profit might this foundation be a good fit for in order to think through that we're going to take a look at some of the information they have to offer here i'm going to take a look at their application guidelines page and here's where we're going to get a lot of really good information first we get a sense of what the size of the grants that they offer are they say that up front here the typical range for their grants are between one and twenty thousand dollars so these are small to medium-sized grants so probably best for smaller or medium-sized organizations with budgets maybe under 500 000 a year um i believe i read that this particular foundation is very interested in making uh grants for whom the amount of money they can offer will make a meaningful impact for the organization so that means the smaller grant amount will mean a lot more to a smaller non-profit than it would mean for a very large maybe multi-million dollar non-profit they uh like all foundations generally speaking they talk about the types of non-profits and the specific issue areas that they're interested in and this is very important information because if you don't fit um or match with one of these issue areas then most likely this is not going to be a grant foundation for you so for this particular foundation they say that they're interested in supporting museums cultural and performing arts programs schools hospitals educational skills training programs programs for youth seniors and persons with disabilities environmental and wildlife protection activities and other community-based organizations and their programs so this is actually compared to many foundations a pretty wide variety of different issues that they are interested in supporting um so that's that's that's good a lot of foundations are very very focused and they only want to serve um non-profits who are helping kids age five to thirteen and you know they can get pretty specific sometimes so this is really helpful information um and then of course here they say that they uh will make funding available to nonprofits in the united states they don't specify a particular city or state many foundations do this could be a non-profit anywhere across the country as long as they fit this that doesn't mean that it won't be competitive and that everyone is going to be guaranteed to get a grant from this foundation but does show you the scale of who they're looking to serve so the next thing we want to look at are the requirements for applying for this grant this is very very important because you need to make sure that you are ready and in a position to meet the requirements which means submitting the grant exactly how they want to have it submitted this foundation and generally most foundations will only make grants to nonprofits that already have their 501c3 tax-exempt public charity status from the irs so this is probably not a grant that you'd be able to get if you're just starting up and have not had that paperwork done yet so you're going to need to do that you also are going to need to be able to provide additional financial information including recent 990s these are the tax forms that nonprofits must file with the irs every year even if they're very small and don't have a lot of revenue coming in they could file an easy version of that but they've got to file that um it's not 100 clear if this foundation would accept a grant proposal from a non-profit that doesn't have a lot of that information available so that's something that you'd want to read through and be very very careful to note they do mention including an itemized operating budget and so that's the budget for your entire organization this would include all of your expenses everything from your operations or administrative costs to your program costs and then they also say that if you are going to submit a proposal for a specific program or project typically that program or project would have its own separate budget specific to that project's needs and they are looking for you to submit that as well so they want you to submit a letter request and they have all of this criteria for other things that they want you to submit to so in addition to your letter of request on your 501c3 determination letter from the irs and budgets they really are asking for you to include a cover letter and they actually provide an example cover letter we'll take a look at that in just a minute which is very helpful they want you to provide a cover letter and it has to include very specific information and then they want you to include the actual narrative proposal where you're going to write out your request and so once you do the cover letter you're going to be able to write the proposal itself another important thing to note is the deadlines that they've laid out here they appear to have two rounds of grants so this is two times in the year when their board of directors will meet they will review the board applications from non-profits who've submitted one and then they're going to make a decision and the deadlines are stated here so it looks like may 10th and november 10th with the assumption that the nonprofit will get the grant if they are awarded one within a couple of months of that decision date so it looks like to get a grant in the autumn time you're going to need to submit it by may 10th and so forth okay so this is not a postmark deadline this is really important they want you to mail a hard copy of the proposal so you've got to print it out and physically mail it to this address by the deadline and it has to get there by that deadline that's not a postmark deadline it can't you can't ship it that day and have it postmarked that day it has to arrive at this address by that date some foundations require that proposals be physically mailed in and not emailed do not try to email it because you will be declined foundations um when they get so many applications they need to be able to just focus on the applications from nonprofits who have followed their criteria to the letter and so this is this is what this foundation is asking for so if you don't follow this if you email it instead you're likely to be rejected before i get into what i would personally write and include in the main proposal for this particular foundation we're going to look at two more things and that's going to be the example cover letter that they mention here and we're also going to check out this faq page just to make sure that we're not missing anything really important that might influence what we would include in our proposal language or make sure there's no rules that we don't know about that we're not going to be able to follow so first let's take a look at this example cover letter page so they give you a nice template for what this should look like which is very helpful you can pretty much just copy and paste this top part and fill in your own information with your own organization's name your name etc they have a great checklist here they want you to provide a brief overview of your organization and a brief description of the funding request and they are very specific to say it cannot be longer than 100 words you've got to follow this this is probably my least favorite thing about grant writing is wordsmithing to get down the word limit or character limit on an application because you've written something really good and you're so excited about it and then you're like ah but it's 200 characters over the limit then you got to fix it but anyway with practice you get you get better at that so you want to keep this really simple you know x organization is a non-profit that has this mission statement and you want to maybe offer a few uh concrete examples phrases of the specific activities your organization does in order to meet its mission so this is very specific through our counseling and crisis intervention resources and referrals et cetera et cetera we aim to break the cycle of poverty this is their vision statement i've talked in previous videos about what a vision statement is a nonprofit's vision is how they envision the world would be if they succeeded at their work so this hypothetical organization imagines a world where the cycle of poverty is broken and that they've addressed its root causes that's pretty compelling then they have apparently a few more words they can fit in here so they explain how many people they serve if you can follow this formula you'll be in pretty good shape funding request so here's where they're talking about in general sense what they want to use the funding for so ex-organization requests um funding to support this specific program and this is how many people it will serve they have they have the their number of people that they would serve here um it explains what specifically the program does in short succinct terms they say the types of support it provides the specific activities that it offers and then down here they explain what part of the program the funding would cover and they say it would support the program staffing and equipment costs and this is all information that you can summarize here in this cover letter but then expound upon in your main proposal letter so the final thing i wanted to point out on this example cover letter is that the proposal the main body of the grant application they say it can't be longer than three pages so that's just something to keep in mind as you're writing now i promise we would look at the frequently asked questions page before i talk a little bit about what i would include in the proposal so in any case that a foundation has a page like this definitely read through it thoroughly before starting your application what i found is that foundations don't intend to be mysterious or difficult to understand they want you to succeed in submitting um an effective application it doesn't mean that you'll get the funding but they want you to have all the information up front to make sure that you're not wasting your time applying if you're not going to be a good fit and they're not wasting their time reading your application if you're not a good fit so a lot of foundations will put all of this transparent information up front so you'd want to read through a page like this i did just want to talk about a couple of things that i saw on this page that were interesting the first is this question 11 here may my organization submit an application under a fiscal sponsor and they say yes so this tells me that this might be a potentially good fit for a newer organization because an organization that's operating under a fiscal sponsor may not have obtained their own 501c3 status yet it typically means they're just getting started and are operating maybe under a partnering organization's tax exempt status while they're getting their feet under them so that was a good sign there the second thing that i wanted to point out was question 14 how much funding do you recommend for a first-time applicant this question itself reinforces to me that this foundation might be open to receiving proposals from newer organizations so that's a really good sign they do say that there's not a specific amount they expect you to make a reasonable request it has to be within the range that they stated which again is one thousand to twenty thousand here um and it has to make sense for the purpose that the funding is being requested for so don't request twenty thousand dollars if your proposal describes that you only need to buy one thousand dollars worth of materials with the money make it make sense for the proposal the final thing i wanted to show you before i get into what i would write in that three page letter of request that they're asking for is this question here what are some common problems with grant requests received by the foundation really this is very helpful feedback they talk about missing materials people not following instructions which i mentioned before this one was really really interesting and a problem i've heard with a lot of folks writing grant applications is don't include a lot of jargon and flowery language in your grant you want to be as clear and succinct as possible consider that the folks at the foundation are having to read through a lot of grant proposals and if they have a confusion about what you're actually saying or it's unclear and it's not direct and to the point um then you're gonna lower your chances of inspiring them to choose you to receive a grant it can be very tempting to try to include a lot of inspiring epic language in the hopes of getting people excited but i can speak from personal experience and say that that can backfire which isn't to say that there isn't um a skill to writing language that is both succinct and compelling and inspiring you can do both it just takes some practice so when you're writing your proposal letter just be sure to be clear to the point specific and explain in clear terms why is it important to receive support and who is it going to help and how many people is going to help so now we have taken a look at their application guidelines their example cover letter and their frequently asked questions page now we know that um we might be a good fit for this foundation and we're feeling like we understand the requirements that we're going to be able to fulfill those requirements so now it's time to get into the big part which is writing the grant proposal letter itself this is that three page letter they did not give us a lot of guidance on their website about everything they want included in this they were pretty general so based on what i saw on the site here's what i saw uh this does the three pages does not include the supplementary materials that they asked for like the budget that they want you to submit the 51c3 letter etc so that's that's good um the must-haves that i saw are the organization's mission so the purpose for the organization existing and um outline of the program or project for which the funding is requested now when i go forth to write a grant letter grant proposal i also include in the must-haves two other things the very first thing i write is this one or two sentences that it just summarizes the request so it might be something like um abc organization requests five thousand dollars to support technology upgrades on being very specific here um for our youth program so just like a sentence that explains how much you're requesting and the the a short summary of what that funding will support um just up front so that it's very clear what the request is so that's what i might put there um the problem or need statement this is the explanation of why your organization exists in the first place what problem in the world your organization is aiming to address or solve and specifically in your geographical service area the scope and the scale of this problem so you might say something like let's say you're a non-profit that serves under served youth helping them with tutoring or technology so that they can learn remotely something like that the problem might be in the city of tomsville making up a name here um 2000 children do not have access to computers to be able to learn remotely this number has increased over over the past three years so i'm talking about the scale of the problem what is the problem problem is that these kids don't have access to computers so they can't learn remotely and the problem has gotten worse so we need support to be able to tackle this problem to nip it in the bud then you also might talk here about the consequences of not addressing this problem so why is it important why should anyone care that these kids don't have access to computers to learn remotely well in this case the consequences the research that we've done as organization abc the consequences are that when kids can't learn remotely the uh education equity gap increases so kids in a lower income bracket are less likely to graduate from high school obviously i'm talking off the cuff here but you'd want to talk about like why they should care what the consequences of not addressing the problem will be okay so you have filled out your need statement you've talked about the consequences of not supporting this project here then you want to talk about what you're going to do how does your program or project that you're requesting the funding for actually address the problem and need that you described just above it so for this you would break it down in a couple different sections you want to talk about the specific goals of the program for that year this foundation did say that the funding they provide needs to be spent within one year of receiving it so you want to keep the goals specific to that year so you want to talk about um okay so if there are 2 000 kids who don't have access to computers and you want to use the funding to upgrade technology perhaps to give them computers or something like that um how many children do you plan to be able to serve with this five thousand dollars what are your goals for the program then you want to talk about how the program works the actual behind the scenes logistics you don't have to go into too much detail here but people want to be able to visualize what it looks like for your organization to fulfill its mission what are the specific activities conducted so maybe in this hypothetical example that we've been playing with it might be something like abc organization receives requests for laptops from low-income families we review the requests we see who can donate a laptop we refurbish the laptop and then we deliver the laptop and give the families a training on how to use the laptop that's how the program or the activity works in this hypothetical example and it explains also how those activities help the people being served finally and this is a big thing for foundations and for all donors they want to know how you are evaluating whether or not your program or project is successful how do you measure and track the results what evaluation methods are you using are you doing a survey are you tracking how many people are served or in this example how many kids are receiving laptops and feel confident using the laptops maybe you ask them that in a survey if this program has been going for a couple years what are your past results showing what have you learned what do you want to do better on how will the funding help your program grow so depending on how much you're going to fit in this section up here if you have space left you can choose to include a few other things it's okay if you don't use all three pages also i'm sure the foundation committee reviewing all of proposals will thank you if you don't use it as long as you get in all the really important information but if you want to take a chance and include a few other things then some other things you might want to include are maybe the history the organization um to demonstrate that you have a good reputation that you are experienced you know what you're doing the past impact so far so this is something we talked about up in this program areas if you have data on how your program has been going or the number of people served by your organization so far you can include that another big question that foundations often ask is how are you planning to keep operating this program with funding after our grant runs out this particular foundation did say on their site they do not prefer to offer multi-year funding so when they make a grant to an organization they're expecting that it will be for just one year which means you have to find other sources of funding after that now it can be kind of a risk to simply answer well we'll just get other grants in this response because as we talked about grants are pretty competitive they can be difficult to get so one potential avenue for this would be to describe how the investment of their funding will help you generate more revenue so maybe the five thousand dollars in this hypothetical example will actually kick start an earned income revenue stream for your organization that will bring in three times that amount of money in the next year so that you can serve even more kids so instead of it just being a grant it now sounds more like an investment that could be a compelling option for how you would describe how it'd be sustainable so just think through how are you going to fund this afterwards if you use their grant funding and you cannot get a future grant from them and then finally if you have space it might be a good idea to include just a very brief story or testimonial from someone you've actually helped to put a human face on this application you know we talked about including data and statistics and outcomes but nothing beats a story but in this case you don't have a lot of room to tell a real long story so you might just include a brief quote from um somebody that your organization helped and how it changed their life so in this example that we've been using of a non-profit serving kids who need technology maybe it would be something like mrs jones couldn't afford a laptop for her first grader so the abc organization provided one as a result little bobby jones's confidence in using technology grew and his grades improved when he had to learn remotely because of the covid19 pandemic so you're talking about how your organization helped and how it changed that child's life i hope you found this useful and helpful as you are considering whether you might be applying for grants when you're launching or growing your non-profit organization share in the comments what did you think what did you learn what was the most surprising thing that you learned how would you approach things differently if you had a different perspective don't forget to give this video a thumbs up if you liked it and subscribe to my channel and ring the bell for more videos like this one more thing i have a great group on facebook called change the world or bust where myself and lots of others who are either starting non-profits or doing other kinds of social impact projects are just having great conversations so i encourage you to come check out our community and if you're so inclined join us finally i am getting ready to do a lot more to work with folks who are starting their non-profit journeys and i'm going to be offering some online trainings and other materials on my website pretty soon so feel free to go check out my website i will leave the link in the youtube description below but if you're interested in getting some extra guidance and support on your own non-profit journey i hope that you'll check that out and consider joining me on that as well once again i'm amber melanie smith and thank you so much for watching see you next time