Q&A: Are Grants Worth the Effort?

We often receive questions about grants and grant writing. To best serve our friends with questions and our readers, we will post these questions and our answers on a regular basis (as best we can!). If you have a question about grants, grant writing and/or grant seeking, please email us using the contact page on the blog.

Our question this week is as follows:

I know that getting grants is one way to fund tech projects for my library, but it seems very time intensive and like something that you have to have a ton of expertise to do well. Is this something that’s really worth the effort? What should I do to get started?

Making the decision to pursue grants for additional funding is a smart and proactive means to responding to a poor economy and strangled budgets. For public libraries, the concept of more money in a budget is almost foreign. So rather than watching your materials collection disintegrate, you can take a step in a positive direction and pursue other funding through grants.

Understand that it is not an instant process or a quick bandaid. Pursuing grants does take some time, but if done well, could be a substantial supplement that can help you to implement programs once thought of as out-of-reach due to budget constraints. There is no expertise requirement to start. What you will need most of all is a strong belief in your programs or cause and the ability to communicate that well. If you are unsure of your writing skills, ask a colleague to assist you.

Start at the local level when looking for grants for your library – your community foundation, businesses in the area that have a corporate giving program, and family foundations. These types of organizations may not be able to cover all of your programs costs with one grant, but if pieced together could help to make a significant addition to your budget.

Find a reliable source, such as GrantSelect, for foundations and other giving programs. You will need to refer back to this on a regular basis. Seeking and applying for grants will become a continuing process, and once you’ve had some success you will be more likely to find other funders as well.

Good luck!