Grants: Before You Dive Into the Deep End

Before you take the plunge and go after grants, you may want to improve your chances by developing one document that can ensure that you receive serious consideration: an organizational case statement.

What is a case statement? It's a well-written document that collects all the information about your organization and project needed to give credibility to your request and persuade a grantmaker to commit funds. It provides the rationale for making a grant or donation to your nonprofit. It answers the question: why is what you do the best that can be done and what is vitally needed?

A case statement document is usually created by a professional fundraising consultant or executive, and must set your program in the context of the larger world: it places your program not only as the best or among the best in your field, but also in serving the needs of your community or region. It  includes detailed information on the population you serve, the issue you address, or the need for your research project. And it justifies your budget in narrative form (this part is too often omitted from case statements).

It's very important to collect everything in one place. It's also important to set a schedule for regularly updating it: every six months, ideally.

The case statement should include your mission, vision, history, budgetary information in narrative form (including sources of ongoing funding), your values and goals. It should state clearly and persuasively, in jargon-free, correct English, the journalistic basics: who, what, when, where, and why of your fundraising efforts.

Ask yourself:

How does this organization help people?
Who do we help?
What vital or unique services do we offer?
What is our track record?
What are our plans ?
How do we use our money? 

Why do we deserve support?

Who else contributes to our cause/

Pilanthropy picking up?

I won four private foundation grants totaling $158,000 in the last eight months for three different clients. Looks like grantmaking is picking up as Wall Street picks up and foundation endowments again gain strength. Direct mail returns for my clients at year-end also picked up by 10-15% year over year. This year is looking more robust for philanthropy.

It's only anecdotal evidence, but the other grant writers and fundraising consultants I've talked to report better returns in the last six to eight months too. Statistics bear out the recovery of charitable giving that began in 2010 and continued in 2011, as The Philanthropist reported last year, based on Blackbaud's survey of more than 1,400 nonprofit institutions.

It's encouraging to see evidence of this in my own corner, and to pass along more hopeful estimates to my clients. Let's keep our fingers crossed that, along with other hopeful signs in the economy, this trend continues in 2012.

Social Media for Social Good

The Foundation Center has several video presentations on this important topic:

Who's Using Social Media for Social Good

One thing that struck me in the first presentation is the jump in the number of people using Facebook, Twitter, and other social media -- and using it as their first news/communication source of the day. I believe they even cited people who log onto Facebook before they get out of bed. And of course there are people like me who check FB periodically throughout the day on their smartphones.

It's not just a new form of communication, it's a new way of being part of a larger world. And part of maneuvering your cause into the mainstream of that world-feed is crafting short, frequent messages about what you're doing that can join the river of information we are all increasingly swimming constantly.

Donors Intend to Give More

The Chronicle of Philanthropy has an article on a hopeful trend. It surveyed charities in the Philanthropy 400, the newspaper's list of organizations that raised the most from private sources. Donors reported that they intend to give more this year.

Of course, one of the bright spots in 2010's year of giving was the boost in online giving. The survey found that online giving is now such a strong habit that donors at every age level prefer it. They cited these statistics:

• More than 50% of donors 65 and older said they'd give online
• 75% of people 35 to 64 said they'd give online
• 86% of those under 35 prefer to give online

Is anyone surprised by this? If you are, you've been hiding in a cave. To me, the most stunning statistic is that half of 65+ year-old donors would give online. So if your nonprofit isn't making major use of online giving and communications -- and making it supremely easy -- go look into it right now. Even if it's Sunday evening.

I had an online shopping experience recently that made me thoughtful about the online giving experience. It could be entitled, "It's Paypal, Paypal, Payal." I tried to fulfill a retail purchase on my iPhone while in a moving vehicle -- big mistake. If you've ever tried to fill out those forms, input your credit card data, and create a user profile in an online purchase, you know what a pain they can be.

Paypal = one button shopping. Get it on your website today! Next time I buy or donate, it will be to an organization that takes Paypal! Because I'll probably be doing it on my phone or tablet.

Think of it in terms of getting the envelope opened. Same deal. Don't make it hard for your donors.

Inspiring others to give

Fundraising is getting professionalized, and I wonder if with the arrival of letters after our names (well, not mine), the essential art of raising funds quietly slips out the door, letter by letter. In the latter case, I think it's the letters of communication slipping away. Much fundraising I see has the character of arm-twisting or advertising, and is moving farther and farther away from the humane work of simply inspiring people to give.

I had this in the back of my mind while searching for information on bequest marketing, (yes, I admit I was googling the term "marketing"), and I came across the blog of one English fundraiser named Ken Burnett. Pretty far down in his article was this stunning quote, which I want to print out and paste on my monitor:

• "The secret of success is to realise that at its heart fundraising is little more than telling great stories very well. And it is nothing less than the inspiration business. For we don’t just ask for money, we inspire it."

Burnett goes on to quote from a book: 

"George Smith put it in his brilliant little book the Tiny Essentials of Writing for Fundraising (White Lion Press 2003), which will make our donor’s heart soar. What he actually wrote was

"‘I suggest your heart would soar if – once in a while – you received a letter written in decent English which said unexpected things in elegant ways, which moved you and stirred your emotions, which angered you or made you proud, a letter which you wanted to read from beginning to end, a letter apparently written by one individual to another individual. For you never see these letters any more...’"

Burnett and White Lion Press are based in England, but fundraising principles are based on human nature, so I don't think it matters whether you're raising pounds or dollars, the "Tiny Essentials" would be the same. I'm going to get it for my library.

How to Beat the Recession and Raise More Funds by Planning

Giving USA Foundation, which has released reports on philanthropy in America since 1956, cites 2009 as one of the worst downturns in charitable giving in a long time. The Executive Summary of their 2009 report stated:

Total charitable giving fell 3.6 percent (-3.2 percent adjusted for inflation) in 2009, to an estimated $303.75 billion. This is the steepest decline in current dollar terms since Giving USA began its annual reports in 1956. Last year was also the worst year economically in America since the Great Depression. At least through mid-year, financial transactions of all kinds slowed while people considered and worried about the future. Nonetheless, Americans continued to give—less often perhaps, more quietly than in the past—to charity.

That's the bad news -- and the good news. Giving was down, and despite the worst recession since the Great Depression, people still gave to charities.

Last year will doubtless show an improvement in giving, to judge by reports from a number of nonprofits. Still, in this environment, it makes sense to do everything you can to position your organization's fundraising program to make the best use of its strengths and to minimize its weaknesses.

Most nonprofits get a failing grade in one critical element of fundraising: long-term planning. Planning ahead might only mean looking 12 months out, but looking ahead and making a plan, and a budget to go with it, can set you up for success where others are floundering and losing donations and donors.

Another key to succeeding in this economic climate is to rely less on foundation grants and more on individual donors. Foundation giving dropped 8.9% in 2009, while individual giving dropped only .4%. That's easy math to do -- yet many nonprofits don't do nearly enough to mail appeals for funds to their existing donors, let alone to prospective donors. While it's a tough time to prospect in the mail, if you stop completely, your donor universe will shrink.

If you want to download the report and read it for yourself, it's free and can be found here.

Good news on the horizon for fundraisers

In a recent issue, The Chronicle of Philanthropy predicted a jump in giving in 2011 from top donors. The article talked about what I think of as "the Warren Buffett club," a group of top billionaires pledging to devote half or more of their wealth to charitable causes. It said that few made big gifts in 2010, but the author predicted a better outcome in 2011 by this group's philanthropy. The article pointed to fading fears of a double-dip recession (but since when are billionaires so worried about a recession?) and the resolution of tax issues that concerned the mega-wealthy as contributing to a probably improved giving climate.

Ironically, of course, the non-wealthy continue to give more generously than anyone expected, given the economic climate. It seems that the widow's mite still matters most in this world. The article gives these statistics on the downward trend in mega-giving:

*  In 2010, just nine people on the top-50 wealth list committed more than $100-million, compared with 16 in 2007, and 18 in 2006.

*  The median gift was $39.6-million, down from $41.4-million in 2009, $69.3-million in 2008, and $74.4-million in 2007.


All in all, I'm glad I work more with non-mega-wealthy donors. Their philanthropy didn't take a similar big dip during the recession, despite the fact that most middle-class people were much harder-hit by the recession than the ultra rich. If it weren't for generous "small" donors, many small nonprofits would have gone under in the last two years.

Hooray!

I'm happy to report some good year-end returns for several of my direct mail and grant development clients, including:

* A social services agency doubled their year-end mailing returns by following up the main appeal with a brief reminder a few weeks later to those who hadn't responded.

* A total of $650,000 raised in grants to date for a small renovation project -- more than half of the total needed, with 12 months more to go in the campaign.

* Increased year-end mailing returns for a nonprofit that supplements the high cost of energy through the winter months for low-income people.

Hopefully, as we move further into 2011, we'll see increases in returns from mailings and grant-seeking, with the economy improving and the stock market coming back, thereby increasing the endowments for many foundations that had pulled back on grant-making due to the shrinking of income from their assets.

Hooray for an encouraging end to 2010 and a good start to 2011 in fundraising through the mail and grants! If you have "Hooray" stories to share, I'd love to hear about them. Positive news cheers us all in this field.

Strategies of Grant-Seeking

While many courses are offered in writing actual grant proposals, few courses -- if any -- address the need to analyze the programs for which grants are being sought in the context of funders' current priorities and strategic links between a nonprofit's board and the decision-makers in foundations. It always surprises me that so much attention is paid to the word-smithing (not that careful writing isn't one of the strategic elements of grant-seeking), while so little is paid to the matching of prospects and outcomes, as well as the fundraising climate within which the grant-seeking nonprofit operates.

A few years ago, I wrote a grant proposal which received a few big grants, one of them for $400,000 (a challenge grant that represented 28% of the total cost of the project. We were all ecstatic, of course, but also realistic about what went into that award: the perfect moment in the nonprofit's history for such a project (a capital project), several local foundations with large endowments and narrow geographic scope, a well-written proposal package, a lean-and-mean operating budget that was a testament to good management, and -- drumroll here -- a strategic linkage between the nonprofit's board and that of the foundation.

Conditions like this rarely occur. And sometimes, when they do occur, those raising funds fail to recognize the opportunities. They may go to the well with the wrong project or a poorly executed proposal. They might mar the ideal climate of linkage and need with an unfortunate recent operating deficit. Or their board might be unwilling to help by using their linkages.

Good sources of training and consultation? Of course, I'm a great source of consultation on your grant strategies! But The Foundation Center is a wonderful source of high-quality grant development courses. Send your staff, yourself, your board.

Long Foundation website is back up & Pepsi tries cause-related marketing big-time (instead of half-time)

For those trying to complete an online application or LOI at the Thomas J. Long Foundation, the website is back up and functional this morning.

New style of corporate philanthropy being explored by Pepsi, who took big-bucks advertising budgets and tried cause-related marketing to win consumers by having a local, not a national, impact with their outreach activities. Pepsi Refresh is interactive, allowing participants to vote via Facebook for philanthropic ideas for Pepsi. Innovative, wave-of-future kind of thing. Pepsi is measuring response and analyzing whether this new approach will be better for them than Super Bowl ads. Prediction: it will be better.

Grant-seeking Tips & Updates

It's often in the fine print on foundation websites that you learn the most about what they're funding and looking for, and also about their grant cycles. Thorough research is key to winning grants; don't let yourself just salivate over the size of grants from a foundation that funds similar causes to yours. Dig in and find the hints and precedents that will help you hone your proposal and time it well.

Some foundation updates:

Alert: for those trying to upload an online application to the Thomas J. Long Foundation, the website appears to be down for the last few days. I have one in process and cannot get to the e-Grants area to continue to work on it, with a February 7 deadline approaching. The foundation has reported problems in the last two weeks with its site; I'm sure they'll be getting it fixed soon.


For those interested in applying to the Wayne and Gladys Valley Foundation, a big funding source in the East Bay of San Francisco Bay Area, you might have missed a key statement on the foundation's website announcing that the foundation is winding down its operations over a multi-year period, meaning that the size of grants may be larger than before:

To insure that the Foundation’s assets are distributed in the primary areas that the founders, Wayne and Gladys Valley, designated, and — equally as important — that grants are awarded on the basis consistent with the founders’ intentions, the Members have unanimously elected to wind-down and terminate the Wayne and Gladys Valley Foundation.

Due to the magnitude of the Foundation’s assets and to allow sufficient time to successfully complete the wind-down, a target date of September 2018 has been set. The Board of Directors and staff have been developing a Strategic Plan to accomplish the termination.

2011 - Anyone Have a Crystal Ball?

Apparently, The Chronicle of Philanthropy does, as they are predicting a tough year for nonprofits, due to flat foundation grants and corporation giving. But, as they used to say in the publishing industry, "Flat is the new up."

My clients have experienced a tougher grants climate, no doubt about that. Coupled with cutbacks in California's funding of social services and education, that spells the need to get more sophisticated in your fundraising strategies. Here are a few of the successful strategies some organizations report as boosting their donations:

* Recruit new donors more aggressively. While it seems counterproductive to spend more in a down economy, over a few years, many nonprofits find giving is up, due to expanding their donor universe.

* Be more aggressive in winning back lapsed donors. As they say in business, your past customers are your best prospects. In many, many ways, they're qualified prospects, known to have an interest in your cause, be willing to donate, and perhaps have a vested interest in seeing their previous investment expanded.

* Make it easier to donate online. More visibility translates to more donations. And the place to have more visibility these days is on the Internet.

Hope your year-end returns are more than you had hoped for!

For more ideas on planning your fundraising program for 2011, get in touch with me:  rachel@dacushome.com.

SEO for Nonprofits

Websites, donations, direct mail, newsletters, blog, brochures--how to make it all fit together?

For nonprofit organizations the new world of social media--fitting it all together seamlessly--is worse than a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle. And the acronym SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is harder to grasp than a term in a foreign language. At least there's Babelfish for translating foreign languages!

But SEO is one of the keys to the onine kingdom, and online is increasingly where donations happen. SEO involves how you design your website so someone can find it, using the magic of strategically placed keywords that put your site in the first page of a Google search. Because if you're found on page 45, it's like not being found at all. But if you're Number Four n the first page, you're going to get a lot of newcomers browsing around your website. And that's partly why you have one, right?

I'm no SEO expert, but I know that this hidden dimension is often neglected when setting up a nonprofit's website. Here are a few sites that explain more:

The Nonprofit's Guide to SEM

Wild Apricot Blog (a great blog for many issues nonprofits deal with)

SEO Copy-writing Tips

And here's something you should also check out--Google Grants:

Google Grants

Getting record returns for a mailing

I'm happy to report that one of my year-end mailings is garnering record returns for the nonprofit organization. Of course, many factors play a part in the success or failure of a solicitation mailing, but one of them, I believe, is bringing together the right content and visuals to the right list.

The secret here is know your house list well. It's not a static commodity. Studying your database, keeping detailed notes, and reviewing the notes and other characteristics of your donorbase periodically helps tighten your focus. Who are these people you're writing to? What do they want to know about your agency? And what moves them to give?

So much of the conventional wisdom about direct mail is dated and generalized. For example, knowing that 90% of the audience into which we mailed this record-return letter was religious, but that that figure was down from previous percentage for that donorbase, helped to make the decision to modify the religious tone, so as to be more inclusive of non-religious people in the donorbase. That extra percentage may have responded more vigorously than before because the appeal was broadened to make them feel more included.

In times like these, when every edge you can get can make a big difference, it pays to analyze your donorbase often and to try new things.

Happy year-end mailings and returns! (And don't forget to send the follow-up letter a few weeks after the main mailing to those who didn't respond. Email me for wording ideas.)

Raising last-minute dollars at year's end

New media can provide last-minute appeal platforms or vehicles for follow-ups to mailed solicitations. Text messages, social media pages, Twitter posts, and email blasts are tools that can cut delivery time and add another "ping" to your year-end fundraising campaign.

It's a little late for DIY action, if you don't already have vehicles in place, but anyone can easily learn to add a Facebook page or Twitter account for their nonprofit organization. And for the next campaign, there are businesses that assist nonprofits in using mobile and social media. Here are a couple to look into for an early start next year:

Mobile Giving

Constant Contact

Campaigner

The best way to reach the most important donors on your list? Get all the staff and volunteers your can get together for a holiday card writing party and hand-address and sign some cards to thank donors for their past support. Don't forget to include a reply envelope!! You might be surprised at the returns gratitude brings.

In the Mail? Getting Returns?

I've just worked on seven different mailings for nonprofits in the last two months, the usual fall crush of everyone trying to get a mailer our before Thanksgiving.

I hope your organization is already in the mail and will soon start getting year-end donations, but if you're not, here are some ideas for a last-minute save. Thanks to some of my clients and colleagues for the ideas.

* Print a double-sided flyer on colored paper, or if you have a lot of brochures in stock, use those, and approach a local newspaper or free sales flyer about inserting them to support your good cause. If you include your website for making donations (you do have a page for online donations, don't you?), you may pick up enough new donors to make the modest expenditure more than worthwhile, if you consider the follow-up gifts you'll get from about 50% of these new donors.

* Approach local stores and ask them to stock your flyers or brochures, being sure to insert either a donation envelope or the URL of your website for donations.

* Send a January mailing, mentioning that a deductible donation is deductible in any year it's made. You'll find your mailer one of the few in the mailbox in that month. Many of my clients who do January mailings find it's the most profitable mailing of the year! (People are so busy at the holiday season a lot of fundraising appeals get lost in the shuffle.)

If you have some other ideas, post them here. It would be great if we could compile a list of these ideas. I'd be happy to host it on my website.

Happy many returns!

Good article on budgets and LOIs for grant proposals

About.com has a clear and easy-to-follow article on how to prepare a budget for a grant proposal to a foundation.

The article has a link to another piece on how to write a winning letter of inquiry (sometimes called a letter of interest or letter of intent -- always an "LOI"). I especially like the point it makes that the heading and the first sentence must be very well written, compelling, and make clear what it is you're proposing to do.

Older vs. Younger Donors: Which Ball to Keep Your Eye On?

The answer, of course, is both. Older donors go away because they die, but have deeper pockets and are more in tune with humanitarian realities. But younger people are getting in tune with giving at earlier ages than ever before, and a lifetime giving habit can be formed and become a strong base of support.

Here are a couple of interesting and CURRENT articles on these topics (beware articles on younger donors dated 2006 or something similarly dates):

Serious fun - how to reach young donors

Not-for-profits Reach Out to Younger Donors and Volunteers

The bottom line: as the IBJ article quotes Patrick Rooney, executive director of the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy: “They [nonprofits] are looking for ways to have a multi-prong approach to different cohorts and generations in ways that speak to each generation without affecting the others."

In other words, don't neglect your direct mail campaign to pump up your social media presence, or vice versa. It's an excellent argument (says this author, somewhat self-servingly) for hiring outside help with your donor communications. The work has just doubled. No one development executive can cover all the new territory with the same old number of hours in a week.

If your nonprofit organization isn't in the mail or inbox by now ...

You still have a couple of weeks to hit the sweet spot of the fundraising season in the mail. And mail, of course, no longer just means paper in mailboxes, but can now mean e-mailings, e-newsletters, blogs with links to your donations page, or a mashup of social networking posts with video or audio.

Communication is key in this pressured economy, sending a missive like a missile that penetrates the blather of advertising and appeals with a sharp call to make a difference to real people.

Here are some organizations that get it right, the mix of direct mail, Facebook, Twitter, blog, website, e-newsletter, and donation page that is the media mix we all live within:

Project Open Hand

Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano

Walnut Creek Library Foundation

And here's one that has a little too much going on, and could use a Facebook page and Twitter link. But they have a good first page and print mailing program, plus an e-mailing program:

Center for Early Intervention on Deafness

I've received print mailings from these nonprofits recently that point to their web presence, linking all the forms of communication a donor might be comfortable with, giving them options for responding.

Note that the first screens of their sites link social networking, donations pages, and offers to sign up for e-newsletters and e-mailing lists, along with their basic mission statement, in easy-to-spot locations. One-stop donations shopping for the holidays!

Your thoughts? I'd like to hear about your experience in the mail this season, your mashups, and other forms of successful fundraising communications.

Searching Smart for grants

Do you make the best use of the premier resource for grantseeking from private and community foundations, The Foundation Center? They offer great tutorials for searching in their extensive database of foundations, but not everyone uses some of the tools that give in-depth information, such as the Form 990 tax returns foundations file annually, listing all the grants they've made for the year. This detailed and current information will help you determine the right amount to ask for, the geographic spread of grants in recent years, and whether the foundation tends to make repeated grants to the same organizations.

Searching smart saves time, narrows the focus, and helps eliminate exaggerated expectations about the amount of grant funding that might be available for a given project or nonprofit. More on searching smart in the next installment.