Getting Grants for Nonprofits: How to increase your chances

Getting a grant for a non-profit can be a challenge! But there are a couple of things that you can do to increase your chances of getting one. That's what i'm going to talk about in this video. Welcome back to my channel! My name is Amber Melanie Smith and I make videos here on youtube about starting a nonprofit, creating a social impact, social enterprise, and so much more. My goal is to help aspiring change-makers with tips and strategies to help you change the world and live a life impact and

purpose. i hope this video will help you out on that journey - if it does please go ahead and give it a like, and don't forget to subscribe to my channel for more youtube videos like this. Grants are such a popular topic in the world of nonprofits but it's really important that before we begin going down this path that i give you a little bit of a disclaimer and that is that, despite common misconception, grants are very competitive. Grants are pretty hard to get so i want to make sure that if

you are thinking about working to get grants to fund your nonprofit organization, that you also have some additional revenue options and you're exploring other revenue streams to help you get things going and keep things sustainable. And the other thing is grant funders generally don't want to be your only source of income they don't want you to rely on them for funding so all of that said here are a couple of things that i've learned through my own experiences writing applying for grants and su

ccessfully getting some grants that you can do to increase your odds of getting a grant the first strategy you can employ to increase your odds of getting a grant and in fact this applies to all sorts of donation situations is to try to build a relationship with the grant maker before you apply for a grant also working on having a lot of visibility for your cause getting out there in the community being seen making sure you're engaging the media and having a good positive honorable reputation ca

n all help with that relationship building in my experience it's very difficult to get a grant when you are cold calling like applying for a grant with someone you've never talked to before you've never had any kind of interaction with before because behind every grant institution and grant foundation are human beings and human beings tend to need to support those that they trust that they know that they understand the reputation of so it's all about building those connections in advance this is

true for me too you know i was looking back through some of the grants that we've gotten throughout the years and i saw this pattern of every time we successfully got a grant we had had some kind of communication with or relationship with that particular funder beforehand put yourself in the grant funders shoes would you prefer to fund someone you know and trust and has a good reputation you've seen their track record of success or someone that you've never met before someone that you've never

heard of before and you don't really know fully what they're about even despite what they put in their grant application all things being equal you'd be more likely to fund the person that you're more familiar with that you have a more trusting relationship with and part of this as i mentioned before is building up visibility for your cause so making sure that you are out there talking to people in your community regularly that you are sharing amazing stories with the media regularly trying to e

ngage them to shine a light on what you're doing all of these things contribute to a sense of visibility that can only help you get grants so if you're just starting out and you're new to all of this and you don't have any relationships with grant funders which is let's be frank a lot of us then how exactly do you get started building a relationship with a grant funder here's how you can do that so the first thing and this is pretty obvious when you hear me say it out loud is to reach out to the

grant foundation and see if you can have a meeting with their grant officer not to ask for money just to sit down get to know them learn about the issues they prefer to fund their preferences the types of causes that they funded in the past and share more about what you're trying to do share your vision share your goals and ask this is the key part ask for their honest feedback because you will learn so much if you just put it out there and you're saying here's what we're gonna do here's what w

e're thinking will work please we'd love to hear your feedback first of all people love to give their feedback but second of all this will give you really valuable information about whether or not that particular grant funder could potentially be a good fit to fund you in the future now this won't work with every grant foundation some are private or family based foundations and they prefer to keep a lower profile so that they don't get inundated with requests and in that case it's more about the

m finding you in which case the visibility thing helps but with other types of foundations more established corporate foundations community foundations generally they want to hear from you they want to get to know entities and their community to know about the landscape and who's out there making a difference now if you meet with these folks and it's a great meeting and you think there might be something there then you've got to stay in contact with them every couple of months make sure you're s

aying hello check in on what they're up to share what you are doing share your upcoming initiatives and events invite them to participate these are all great ways to continue to build on that relationship once you've had that initial conversation once you've been building up that relationship for a little while you can start by asking for really small things like share this post on social media or come to our event learn more in depth about what we're doing that gives these potential funders mor

e in-depth knowledge and more up-to-date current news about what you're trying to do and when it is appropriate when that deadline for a grant is coming up they're going to remember who you are and they're going to have seen it firsthand and that's going to increase your odds of getting that grant the second thing you can do to increase your odds of getting a grant for your nonprofit is to start building a portfolio of your impact successes and success stories before you apply for grants you mig

ht even be able to do this before you even get your non-profit status at all when you set out to start building this portfolio of impacts and successes you want to be really mindful of your outcomes and people get confused a lot between outcomes and outputs but what grant funders are going to care about is those outcomes an output is some kind of like product or deliverable that comes out of the service you're providing as a non-profit for example number of meals served or pounds of clothing giv

en to children that's an output but it doesn't really tell you how you changed your community uh in accurate terms so um if you're providing a service your goal is to change your community to make an impact to make the world better than it was before so the outcome is the difference between where the world ended up and where it was when you started if that makes sense an example would be things that changed so as a result of our programming um 10 more people said that they would recycle so that'

s a change that's a change in this case in behavior but it is representative of something that is different now that your nonprofit has done some work than it was before your nonprofit existed that's what funders care about that's what funders want to fund so when you go about to start creating this portfolio of impacts and outcomes make sure that you have a way of measuring things like that it can be a little difficult and challenging to figure out how to measure something like how happy are yo

u now that we exist but when you think about it it's not actually that hard because you could accomplish that particular example with the survey so put in these mechanisms in place when you first start a non-profit when you're first getting things off the ground to be able to measure those impacts and those outcomes if you have events where you're teaching people about a topic ask them what they knew at the start of your your teaching and what they knew at the end of the teaching that represents

the change you want to be able to demonstrate that there's a change and if you're not making the change that you thought you were going to make through this programming these tracking mechanisms these surveys these databases whatever tool you want to use to track your impact it can be really helpful to know because you're starting a non-profit to be able to change your community and if you're not doing that i mean i would want to know right away so having a survey that tells me i'm not doing so

good of a job in this one area that gives me the information i need to be able to change it and then i can improve on it and improve on it and start showing that track record of success that grant funders are going to care about and then here's what you do you start building up these impacts these outcomes and you have really awesome data behind it all of this great gold for grant applications by the way what you do in your grant application is you explain how the funding that that grant could

give you will help you grow upon those impacts either improve them in some way by funding some kind of tool or staff position or software whatever it may be that you're requesting funding for the grant money is going to help you improve on that outcome and it's going to be possible because of that grant funding that's what funders want to know is how is me giving you money going to make the work that you're doing bigger better stronger deeper more impactful whatever it is because if i were a fun

der and i were just going to give money to something that wasn't going to make a difference in some way to that cause then i would not be so inspired to do that there is another part of demonstrating your impact and outcomes that you want to pay attention to and that is that in addition to all this great data you're collecting through your tracking mechanisms you also want to be capturing stories and anecdotes because human beings are really inspired by stories and as i said before behind every

grant foundation is a human being and i've said this before in other videos too that statistics are great they're helpful to show the scale of a problem which you also need to be able to do in a grant application but stories are what inspire people to want to support your cause we are human we've been heavily influenced by stories since the dawn of time and even grant makers are inspired by stories too and where your outcomes trackers and your impacts portfolio will demonstrate how the funding w

ill impact all of the lives that you want to in a particular way a story will tell the uniquely human experience of someone suffering from whatever problem your nonprofit is trying to solve and connecting that to the outcomes the grant funders will know that the story of bob or whomever is the story of all of the people that you're trying to help and the third and final strategy that i want to talk about to increase your odds of getting a grant is to make sure that you are a good fit in the firs

t place all the other stuff won't matter it won't matter if your best friends with this grant foundation if you're not a good fit if you don't align with the issues that they want to fund as a grant making organization many grant foundations have constraints about the types of issues and causes that they can fund from the very beginning so maybe they are influenced by the donor who gave the foundation the money to give away in the first place that donor said i only want to fund causes related to

animals or whatever it may be maybe if it is a corporate foundation it could be um constrained by the type of industry that the company is in for example if it is a company that creates environmentally friendly cleaning supplies and i know a couple in my local area like that they're probably going to be interested pretty specifically in causes that relate to environmental things so conservation helping animals et cetera so all that is to say that don't waste your time or the grant foundation's

time in trying to apply for a grant that you're not going to be a good fit for there are some exceptions where every couple of years maybe the grant foundation changes what they focus on or something big happens in the world and the grant foundation decides they want to focus on that now but in general my experience is that a foundation will be very very unlikely to fund outside of the issue areas and causes that they have declared they want to focus on now it's pretty easy to figure out what th

ose issue areas are most of the time they will state it on their website assuming they have a website but uh in the absence of that you can do the old-fashioned way call them up try to get that meeting with them and just ask them is my cause something that your foundation would ever be interested in supporting and the worst they could say is no and to be honest if you go after grants you might hear no a bit but that's okay not everyone's going to be the best fit for you and you're just going to

have to be ready to hear no get rejected sometimes and keep on going so now i want to hear from you have you been applying for grants have you gotten any grants what do you think made that process process successful for you or what are some of your grant challenges i also want to say and put out there that i've been thinking about doing some videos where i walk through actual real grant applications from foundations that are across the country to talk about how i would approach writing those spe

cific grants if that would be of interest of you please let me know in the comments below and if you have a specific grant foundation that you're interested in me walking through leave that in the comments below too and i will take a look and see if that's something that i can do for you i think it could be really fun to dissect grant foundations grant applications and talk through my mindset what i would do if i were the one writing that grant and maybe it would help you out that's it don't for

get to like this video subscribe to my channel for more youtube videos on non-profit social impact etc and ring that bell when you subscribe so that you can get alerts when my next video comes out finally if you are on facebook don't forget to check out my facebook group change the world or bust where myself and other change makers are having great conversations about how we're making a difference our challenges and social impact and encouraging one another along the way i'm amber smith see you

next time