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By Alex Kolker, Ph.D.
Securing grants just got much harder if you read today’s headlines. Grants are still available and avoiding a disorganized effort when multiple organization team up to apply for funding is key.
Here are six was to get the cross-agency work done for a successful application.
- Be proactive. It’s so easy to see a grant opportunity, bring a bunch of people to the table, and cobble something together. But it’s often a rush job. Instead, come around the table in advance and plan out what you really want to do. Then you go searching for someone willing to fund it.
- Focus on what’s possible. Yes, protecting your organization’s interests is important. But, there’s no reason to focus on that exclusively. At some point, someone needs to stand up and say: “All right, now let’s talk about what we can agree to.” Sometimes just getting something up on the whiteboard is enough to get the wheels going.
- Clarify roles. Decide right from the start which organization is going to be responsible for what, above and beyond the services you each provide. Who will write the grant? Who will manage the money? How will you dole out the funds? Who will be responsible for the financial reporting? Who will be responsible for the outcome measurement? Get it down in writing. It’s always impressive to be able to attach an memorandum of understanding (MOU), signed six months earlier, to your application.
- Choose a primary writer. Pick one person to be the lead. If you don’t have someone who’s assigned to keep track of all the moving parts, people might assume that it’s someone else’s job. If you’re the only grant writer, you still need to secure your “head writer” status so you’ve got each executive director’s permission to approach a member of their staff with assignments.
- Divide up the writing. Who fills out the SF-424 application? Who constructs the budget? Divide up the narrative sections, but then pick one person to put the final polish on it all to make sure it reads as a coherent whole. Most important: Set interim deadlines and enforce them. If Charlie was supposed to get the logic model to you two days ago, you need to be empowered to go to his boss about it.
- Finally, remember that this is a partnership, which means people might need to compromise at times. Tell the partner agencies: “You may get only a slice of the pie. But at least there will be pie.”
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Alex Kolker, Ph.D., is grants specialist at Wastyn & Associates in Davenport, Iowa. His email is [email protected]
