In my eighteen years in nonprofit fundraising, and especially in my years as a dedicated grant writing consultant, I have had my share of rejections from grant funders. Do you feel like you’ve been in a slump lately working your fingers to the bone only to be met with disappointment after disappointment? Do not despair!
#1 Focus on donors who have the same mission as you. Are you really spending enough time searching for potential grant funders or are you just using a machine gun approach and throwing out applications whether you qualify or not? When nonprofits ask me why their grants aren’t being funded, this is the issue I see most often. The nonprofit simply didn’t take the time to research the funder’s interests, their funding restrictions, and general general guidelines. A lot of headache (as well as time and energy) can be saved by only focusing on quality leads.
#2 Follow all grant guidelines to the letter. Believe it: you are forever in competition with other nonprofits for that donor’s money and funders will take every opportunity they can to get rid of applications that can’t even follow simple instructions. You may think it’s unfair but it’s the truth. Grantmakers are bombarded with requests and it makes it easy for them to eliminate as many as possible. Do you want to be the first to throw the garbage? So take my advice and follow all the instructions provided. Not some. Not the majority. All from them.
#3 Use hard evidence to convince funders that your need is a real community problem. You will most likely use a variety of data to support your claim; just make sure your data collection is well documented. When using Internet search, make sure the websites you refer to are reliable and up-to-date. If using your own assessment, please provide your collection method and explain how the data was collected. When citing authorities who speak on your topic, document who said it and the source where you found it.
#4 Include an evaluation component in your proposal. Do you have a solid evaluation plan to measure the success of your proposal? Grant funders want to see that you have a method to collect data about your project. The data may prove that your proposal was exactly on target or it may find improvements that need to be made to your program. Don’t be afraid of evaluation: it can be as simple as a small focus group where program participants are asked questions before and after the project. Grant funders like to see that you are as invested in the success of the project as they are.
#5 Ask them why you did not receive funding. You may be surprised at what you will discover. I once called when we were turned down and found out that my proposal was actually the highest rated! I won’t go into detail here, but I was instructed to submit basically the same proposal next year and it would be funded. And went. Had he not called, he might have assumed they would never be interested and the nonprofit would have missed out on a $75,000 grant. In this case his rejection was not a “no” but a “not now”. It was simply a matter of time. You can dance around that, but I always suggest calling to speak to a program officer about a rejected grant.