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30 CAPTURE. COSTTREE 2016 Q4 ISSUE
Q: What’s the best way to approach finding a grant?
The best way to find a grant is by clearly defining the project you want funded and making certain your project and the grant program are aligned in purpose. This is critical. Grants have become incredibly competitive to win, so don’t waste time just looking at eligibility.
Eligibility is great for informing you if your organization can apply, but there are dozens of key requirements that will tell you if you have the right project. The critical components you should be looking at are the financial requirements of the grant (is there a match?), what the grant will not fund, previous awardees, and award size, to name a few. These key pieces of information will help you decide if you want to invest time and resources to apply.
Q: Would a cost allocation plan be beneficial to someone who only has one enterprise fund?
Absolutely, a cost plan is beneficial for organizations of all sizes. Even those with only one enterprise fund. An enterprise fund means it is some type of utility like water, sewer, trash, that gets charged out to the public on a rate basis. If they do not have a cost plan that means they have no basis for charging an overhead component to the outside public who should be paying for that service.
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Q&A
PRESENTS QUARTERLY QUESTIONS WITH
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Q: Where can I find the right grant?
Today, technology has created a number of very good places to get general grant information. Many of them are free. Grants.gov and Google are two well-known free resources.
But, is having access to more grants really that helpful? For federal grants, it takes about two hours to read through and analyze a Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA). For private foundation grants, it can take less time. If you were to spend a whole week researching grants, you could read and analyze about twenty NOFAs a week and still not find the right grant.
Having resources that provide you with links and summary paragraphs is useful for aggregation, but if the resources don’t do more than act as a listing of grants, then you still need to spend time reading the solicitation. For non-profits, Foundation Center does a good job. For public sector entities, check out the video below: