Hi, I’m Alex Dunn, the Millionaire Grant Lady. I have 15 years of grant writing experience and over $103 million in awards under my belt. I offer advice, tips, tricks and opportunities to the DFW501c.news audience each week.
On federal grants, we are still continuing our Texas Hold ‘Em strategy. We are waiting, and seeing, and verifying as much as we can.
While we continue to Hold ‘Em on federal grants, foundation grants continue.
I have always advised nonprofits to diversify revenue streams. When you have multiple sources of revenue, even if one source of revenue shifts, your important work can continue.
Foundation grants are a vital revenue source for nonprofits.
Foundation grants are also my favorite type of funding to recommend to nonprofits because foundation grants are:
- Flexible: Private foundation grants are typically targeted at broad goals like education, animals, or veterans. Within these goals, you can lay out how your program supports the broad initiative, but with your own unique services and work.
With a federal grant, the RFP outlines each approved use of the money, and these tend to have a laser-like focus. For example, a federal grant released last year was to support taking historically important newspapers published between 1690 and 1963 and digitizing them. Many nonprofits can fit their work into a broad goal like health. Few nonprofits can fit their work into a laser-focused initiative to digitize newspapers.
- Quick: Private foundation grants have a much quicker turnaround on when you’re going to find out if you’ve got the funding or not. While each foundation sets their own timeline for each grant, for private foundation grants, you can usually hear back if you’re going to get the funding in two to six months.
- Easier to Administer: Private foundation funders are also typically more flexible in how they evaluate grant funding. In the foundation grant proposal, you will be able to tell them how you measure success and what markers you are reaching for. You will then have to report within a year about your work and how funding was used. This makes foundation grants much easier to administer, both financially and reporting wise.
On the flipside, government grants are:
- Strict: In each government grant, there are strict parameters about what work the funding can support. For example, a federal grant will say, “We want somebody to do X, Y, and Z.” If your work does not encompass the specific actions required, then you will not get funded. Because of this, federal grant funding is not very flexible.
- Slow: For a federal grant, you are often applying for funding this year that will be coming to you next year. Each government grant will also set a specific start and end date, meaning you must use the funding within the government’s timeline instead of your own.
- Difficult to administer: If you get the federal grant award, they can be hard to administer on the back end, so you have to have significant infrastructure within your organization to track funds and track outcomes to be able to meet the requirements of the grant. For many federal grants, the organization will hire a person whose sole job is to manage that grant, and that is all they do since it takes so much work.
Federal grants can provide millions in funding to the right fit organizations doing work that aligns with the government’s priorities. But this requires organizations to have significant infrastructure, continuously monitor the release of government grant RFPs, and perfectly align their work with the goals of the specific RFP.
Foundation grants don’t require the stars to align for you to apply, and foundation grants can support nonprofit organizations of every shape and size.
