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Developing winning grant proposals requires a deep understanding of your organization. You’ve got to understand the organization’s capacity, expertise, and place in the community. You must be able to provide a concise, thorough overview of the organization, highlighting its fit with the proposed program.

Logic models – charts that illustrate connections between program activities and outcomes – are great tools for planning programs to address community needs, but many nonprofits use them only to help explain a program they’ve already planned. That’s a backwards approach. You’re much more likely to have real impact on the problem your organization wants to address if you use a logic model to guide the planning process.

Fundraising and grant seeking are exhilarating opportunities to align new donors, corporations, and foundations with your mission. But before you can freely pursue these opportunities, there are certain government regulations with which your nonprofit must comply.

We’re excited to start our Alumni Spotlight Series. First up is Project Grantsmanship alum, Jess Peláez, Founder & CEO of Blueprint Earth.

Barbara Floersch & Henry Flood co-lead the Grant Management Essentials training program. They both juggle many hats, and have many years of experience writing grant proposals and training grant pros. We wanted to get to know them a bit better—their grant wins and what they do when they aren’t training or consulting.

Having zero experience with grants and writing proposals, I was unsure of what to expect from the 5-day Grantsmanship Training Program. I knew the basics from what I’d seen working across the training room and from what I’d read on the Grantsmanship Training Program Curriculum webpage during my first few days as the Publications and Research Coordinator at The Grantsmanship Center. The following is a quick breakdown of the week-long training, and some behind the scenes insight on the Grantsmanship Training Program.

We all know what a grant proposal is. It’s a document we write and submit to private or government funders requesting money to support our organization’s work. Right? While grant proposals do indeed request funding, I think this standard definition falls short and points us in the wrong direction. Grant funding is a tool for making something better, and since the real goal is impact instead of money, I propose an expanded definition.

Because grants are social investments meant to produce ongoing change, both funders and grantseekers are concerned about what happens after the grant ends. Most people define sustainability as “obtaining funding to keep the program running.” That’s not quite right. It’s primarily about perpetuating the results that are being achieved. Sometimes sustaining outcomes requires that you continue the program or some part of it — but not always.

The procurement rules governing purchases made with grant funds changed when the federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued new Uniform Guidance on grant administration (the Super Circular) in late December 2014. The good news is that the one-year grace period the feds gave nonprofit organizations to comply with the new requirements has just been extended to two years.

I was in my garage, rushing to work when my cell phone rang:  “This is Bill Zinsser—did you call me?”  Yes I had. In that moment I’d have dropped the phone on the cement if I’d not been clutching it so tightly at the sound of his name. I stood transfixed.