Preparing for a Productive Search for Grants

Before you make any contact with foundations or other grantmakers, you will need to know which organizations to approach. Searching for grants and their sponsors can take some time, but it is the all-important step to take prior to crafting your proposal. Most proposals that are not funded are rejected because they simply did not fit the aims of the sponsor. So creating of short list of good matches will go a lot farther than generating a long list of leads that might not work out at all.

A grants database, such as GrantSelect, is a great tool to help anyone find grants. But like most tools, it is important to know how to use it in order to get the best results. Working out the framework of your project ahead of time will make your funding searches less time-consuming and hopefully more profitable!

To get started, you will need to define the focus your project and begin to identify its vital points:

1. What is the need you will be addressing? Describe the problem or need as you see it. You can also think about what is the specific gap between the existing scene (the way things are) and the ideal scene (the way things should be).
2. Who is affected by the problem or need? Your answer to this question should include the specific target populations you intend to help. Think in terms of age, ethnicity, socio-economic categories, etc.
3. Where are the geographic areas that are affected by the problem? Is the problem you are addressing a local concern? Or does it affect the entire city, state, region, country or does it affect many countries? Once again, be specific.
4. What are your project goals and objectives? Think about what it is that you want to accomplish and how this will benefit your target population.
5. What is your solution? What will you do to solve the problem? Describe your solution as concisely as you can. Think about how you will close the gap between the current situation and the ideal scene.

Write down your answers as you figure them out. By answering these key questions, you should have come up with some great building material that will later become the starting point of your proposal. For our purposes at the moment, in each of those answers you will be able to find topics and keywords that can be used in your funding searches.

Review your answers again and highlight or underline any keywords you find. You can now search for grants by using a single keyword at a time, which will give you a broad set of results, or you can use any combination of these keywords for a narrower set of results.

No search engine is perfect, so it will now be up to you to determine which of the results will make your short list of good matches. Your in-depth knowledge of your field and your project will guide you in deciding which sponsors would be most likely fund your project.

If you are not getting the results you would like, consider trying similar or broader terms to the keywords that you have developed. For instance, a similar term for “At-Risk Youth” is “Economically Disadvantaged.” Grants for researching a specific disease, such as psoriasis, can be hard to find, however there are a greater number of potential matches by using the terms “skin disease” or “auto-immune.” Using similar or broader terms can sometimes yield better results.

Keep the answers to these key questions handy. It will serve as a good reference for you if your searches ever take you off on a tangent, and it will help you in forming the foundation for your proposal.