Leadership capacity: Your leadership’s ability to inspire, prioritize, make decisions, provide direction, and know how to innovate existing static programs into promising fundable programs.
Adaptive capacity: Your board and leaders’ ability to monitor, assess, and respond to internal and external changes related to grantseeking and managing grant awards.
Management capacity: Your leadership’s ability to ensure the effective and efficient use of organizational resources, such as in-kind soft cash match for grant awards.
Operational capacity: Your leadership’s ability to implement key organizational and programmatic functions to fulfill the written promise of a funded grant request.
Creating a Grantfunding Plan
Your grantfunding plan is really a guide and a roadmap for where the dollars will come from for two years to support your programs. Just a few years ago, the trend was to create three- to five-year long-range funding plans. Today, if an organization wants to be on the cutting edge and able to roll with the economic punches, as well as the shifts in priorities by existing funding sources, its strategy needs to focus on two fiscal years. Yes, that’s it — 24 months.
If you have current funders that traditionally fund your organization year after year, their decision-making processes will be shorter. For example, if you have a track record for implementation success (carrying out the program’s goals and activities that you committed to in writing), then there is likely a turnaround time of six months or less from the time your organization requests funding until you get the check in the mail.
On the other hand, if you’re planning to approach new funders, which means building a relationship before asking, the time between the grant application’s submission and the funding decision could be longer than 12 months. What you thought would be awarded in this fiscal year won’t be coming into your bank account until the next fiscal year. This means you need to track funding priorities and decision-making timeframes so you don’t build your annual organizational operating budget on dollars that won’t come in for 12 to 24 months.
In the following sections, I get you acquainted with the components of a typical grantfunding plan, show you an example of one, and give you a checklist of how to keep your plan in tiptop shape.
Looking at the funding plan components
The grantfunding plan (created in table format) that I use the most for grantseeking captures eight fields in this order (see Figure 2-1):
Program, Service, or Activity: This is where you list the program, service, or activity priorities that are written in your organization’s strategic plan.
Funding Source: In this column, you identify the funding source(s) that you plan to approach to support your programs, services, or activities in the current and next fiscal years. You can have multiple funding sources that you contact for one program. Putting all your eggs in one basket (applying to only one funder) and then receiving a rejection letter nine months later is not your goal. If you did that, you would have to start all over with only three months left in the year. Approach multiple funders for every program, service, or activity in need of funding.
Address, Telephone, Email, and Website: By incorporating this column into your funding plan, you have clickable links to quickly email or review the websites of current and potential funders. Adding the mailing address reduces your time-on-task when sending out a letter of inquiry (I provide an example of this type of document later in this chapter). And, most important, the phone number is handy when you need to speak with the designated contact person for the funder.
Contact Person/Title: Research the funder’s website and even call their office to make sure that you have the correct name of the contact person and their title. Make sure to ask how the contact person gender-identifies, if there’s any chance of confusion. Names like Chris and Pat can belong to men and women.
Request: The amount of grant funding that you plan to request goes in this column. Make sure to review the funder’s profile for their grantmaking range. Stay below the top of the range if you’re a first-time grant applicant with the funder.
Application Deadline/Giving Cycle: This column captures the grant application’s deadline(s) and when grants are awarded by the funder. Some funders only accept and award grants once a year, while others may have multiple grant application submission deadlines and giving cycles.
Assigned To: In this column, you add the name(s) of the board member(s) or administrative-level staff that are assigned to making contact with the funder to continue previous funding conversations or begin initial conversations with new funders. In Chapter 22, I explain more about this process.
Status/Results: This is where you insert the status of the funding request — for example: “Contacting in September,” “First contact meeting went well on September 5, 2022,” “Grant application submitted on September 5, 2022,” or “Funding declined for September 2022 giving cycle; letter indicated to apply again next year (2023); follow-up meeting requested to discuss problems with grant application.”
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FIGURE 2-1: An example of a funding plan.
Updating critical funding plan information
The Status/Results column of your funding plan (refer to Figure 2-1) must be updated continuously. After you meet with the funder and can assess their level of interest in supporting your organization, you’ll need to change the meeting status note to the feedback received and add the next step (for example, “Apply this cycle,” “Wait until next year,” or “Not interested in this project”). Here are some essential activities needed on your part to keep the funding plan a working document:
Write it down. You need to officially document your funding plan ideas. Create funding plan templates and hand one to everyone at the meeting. This way, all parties are onboard and writing/talking about the same things in the same sequence.
Use it. The funding plan must become a daily guide to help your organization decide what programs or services have funding priority and how to fund them most logically.
Keep it up to date. Update your funding plan’s Status/Results column every time you apply for grant funding or receive the results of your efforts. Record whether you’re being funded, and if so, the funding amount. If you don’t secure the money, find out why your efforts failed.
Review and revise it annually. Why? Both your needs and funders’ priorities change, sometimes as often as annually. For instance, just because a lot of money is available for programs for after-school academic programs this year doesn’t mean that this funding area will still be the focus next year. Your plan must change to reflect what funders want to fund. In other words, your funding plan isn’t just about what your organization wants or needs; it’s about what funders want to fund within