How can you be innovative enough to keep the grant money flowing without changing your tried 'n true approaches to core services?One approach is to innovate around what's working. If your programs are effective, maybe you can bring innovation to the operations side and how you manage your programs. If your organization has strong service delivery programs and program management infrastructure, perhaps there are opportunities to be innovative in the way you approach the sustainability of your programs and services.

Cost share requires the applicant to contribute a certain dollar amount (or dollar equivalent) to support the budget and thus "share" the costs of the proposed project.  This post is going to cover some of the basics around cost share including why it is required, why it matters when evaluating opportunities, and how you can come up with cost share.

Nonprofits would do well to borrow some of the corporate world's practices when it comes to resource management.

Finding funding opportunities that are a good fit for your organization involves a few steps. Before you begin your search for potential funders, you'll first need to take an inventory of your project's needs and resources.Your inventory should include:

When you start to research funding opportunities, ideally you'll have a budget to pay for a subscription to a foundation database to help you with your search. There are free options, however, paid tools are the way to go if you want to have access to the most comprehensive listings.Below are profiles of six databases for foundation research and one government-sponsored database for U.S. government grants.

The last post reviewed free and subscription-based resources and databases you can use to research foundations. In this post, we'll tackle how to keep track of your research results.

This post is the last of a four-part series on the preparations to complete in advance of preparing a grant application.

Even for a relatively simple proposal, proposal work requires the work of many hands. This means that before you start working on a proposal you'll want to have systems in place to track the status of tasks, delegate work assignments, and communicate with team members. The list below is a collection of tools to manage tasks, email, notes, and workflow.  All of the products on the list offer a free trial period so you can test them out to see if they work for you. Several also offer free versions.

What happens when you want to pursue grant funding but you don't have the time or the skills to write grants? For many nonprofits and projects, the answer is to outsource the work to a grant writer.If you are a nonprofit or project administrator and are considering hiring a grant writer, there are three common assumptions about grant writers you'll want to avoid when reviewing candidates.

After you identify an opportunity to respond to, you'll want to prepare a proposal binder to organize your materials. You may want to prepare several copies of the binder, one for each member of the proposal team.  The contents of the binder will vary depending on how complicated the proposal is. However, there is some standard information you'll want to include in each proposal binder.

Once you've identified an opportunity to respond to and started to assemble your materials, you'll need to recruit a team to work on the proposal. If you've been anticipating an opportunity's release, you may already have your team in place. If this is the case, you can go directly to assembling your proposal binders and scheduling the initial proposal planning meeting.

It takes multiple drafts to get a proposal ready for submission. Before you begin the writing process, you'll want to create a proposal calendar to plot out how many drafts you'll create on your way to the final draft.

For grant writers, the concept of extreme focus may at first seem difficult to apply. After all, a grant application has multiple pieces that need to be developed simultaneously. What should be the "One Thing" worthy of your focus when everything must get done?

Over the last few posts we've covered creating a proposal binder, organizing your proposal team, and planning your draft process. After these preparations, you're almost ready to start writing. Before the writing begins, you'll need to do one more thing, which is to create a framework for the proposal.

In this post, we'll cover two more essential pieces of the proposal management process. The first is to create a template or proposal "shell" for the drafting process. The second piece we'll review is some of the tools you can use to manage the draft  process and keep team members informed of changes to the proposal schedule and proposal development process.

In earlier posts, we reviewed creating a proposal calendar, organizing the drafts, and managing the proposal development process. Now it's time to submit the proposal. The last week of the proposal process can be hectic. Below are six tips to make the final days of the proposal process less stressful and set yourself up for even greater success (and less stress) for the next proposal.

If you work in the nonprofit sector, when you hear "business plan" you may think it doesn't apply to your work setting. But nonprofits, just like for-profits, need to use their resources wisely and plan for the future.

When it comes to grant funding, regardless of whether you are just starting out or have been in operation for years, it's not safe to assume that you'll be able to maintain your organization's operations on grant funding alone. Grants should be part of your business plan, but relying on a steady flow of grant funding as the cornerstone of your funding plan could put you at risk.

If you've never written a proposal before or even if you have, it can be valuable to look at sample proposals, particularly examples of funded proposals. The resource list below consists primarily of links to proposals funded by U.S. government agencies. There are a few foundation sources, including a book released by the Foundation Center that includes more than 30 sample proposals (all successfully funded). Listed below you'll also find links to proposal outlines and grant writing guidance.

Do you work with a new or small non-profit organization? Have you been searching for small grants recently? If have, there’s some good news and bad news….