By Lara Ruggles, Grants Associate
There’s a grant application due in 24 hours, and you haven’t even started on it. This grant would be perfect for your organization, and you’ve got a rough idea of how to communicate the program you’re proposing, but somehow you have to structure that rough idea into something that answers 20 complex multi-part questions, each in 1,000 characters or less. Maybe you’ve known about this grant for a couple of weeks and you just didn’t have a spare moment to sit down and focus, or maybe you’re just finding out about it. Either way, you know the next 24 hours will be stressful, and there won’t be time for anything else.
Sound familiar? We’re betting it does, because we’ve all been there. Almost anyone who’s worked with nonprofits has been in this situation. It’s certainly not fun or ideal, but we usually make it through.
However, grants are best written a little more slowly, over several days or even several weeks. They demand significant capacity for big-picture and long-range thinking, and this is best done when there’s time to make a thorough outline, focus in on one question at a time, let ideas marinate and develop, and step back again and again to ask if the narrative as a whole is communicating everything we need it to communicate, and where it could be stronger.
Sometimes it’s much easier to see which parts of your program are not coming across in the grant narrative with an outside perspective. This is why it can be so helpful to work with a consultant on grants. Not only can a consultant shoulder the burden of the “heavy lifting” and take all that stress and pressure off of you, they will continue to ask questions and further develop the narrative until their outside perspective is satisfied that your programs and mission are being communicated with a high level of clarity. It’s easier for a consultant to notice when details are missing, because they’re not so fully absorbed in the work your organization is doing that they forget that not everyone knows the internal acronyms you’ve created for your programs.
In addition, the right consultant for your project will bring subject-matter expertise to the table that will contribute to writing a successful grant application - they will understand what grant review committees are looking for and how to design your application to hit those targets.
Bynes Consulting Group is a team of three whose wide-ranging experiences in the nonprofit, government, public policy, and grants writing and management combine to ensure that you’ve got the best possible chance of getting that grant. Maddy Bynes-DeVaney started Bynes Consulting Group with the vision of helping nonprofits meet their fundraising goals, and her over decade of significant experience in public policy, advocacy for human services, and program development and implementation puts her in a position uniquely well-suited to that goal. Melanie Emerson is an organizational development and social impact executive who has lived and worked globally across multiple sectors, and whose impressive list of subject matter expertise includes organizational and crisis leadership, conflict dynamics and humanitarian response in conflict zones. And Lara Ruggles is a songwriter whose own career and previous work in fundraising with the Rialto Theatre and the National Independent Venue Foundation has led to a broad understanding of the important relationship between the arts and the strength of local economies. Between the three of us, we feel confident we’ve got the tools and perspectives you need to elevate your organization’s grant applications to the top of the review pile - and help you avoid ever needing to stare down that dreaded down-to-the-wire panic again.
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