RstephensonJR's blog

Anyone who’s ever written a proposal knows this feeling—at some point, you have to start stringing words together and putting them down. What language should you use? What style of writing? To find the appropriate voice for your narrative, consider these suggestions and cautions.

Much has been said about a nonprofit’s need for evaluation and accountability. Donors want to know what their money has produced. Nonprofits need to care a lot about their work AND count the things that tell them the work is producing results. How to balance head and heart?

Here you are, poised and ready to submit a compelling proposal to a very likely foundation prospect. You’ve written a solid narrative, you’ve double-checked the budget and you’ve attached all required documents. Just before you send it—did anybody check your spelling?

By definition, most nonprofits are small (99 percent have fewer than 500 employees) and many are very small (median staff size is four employees). We tend to see a small organization’s work as tied to local or regional circumstances and measure its impact in similar terms. We might be missing the big picture.

It’s a deceptively simple idea, really. The people who actually have an experience are the ones who can best talk about it and reveal its impact. In the worlds of grant-seeking and grant-making, it’s becoming more common for funders to emphasize the “lived experience” of applicants or grantees.

An imaginary conversation at a nonprofit: “Hey, we could sure use some new computers and software. And while we’re at it, we ought to see about new office furniture to replace this old junk.” The development person: “OK, I’ll just write a proposal for technology and other equipment.” Off go the proposals and back comes a big handful of rejections. Why, didn’t they see the need?

Traditionally, it wasn't the norm to think in business terms about your nonprofit but it’s a useful exercise because it sharpens your thinking about what you do and how you do it. One element of this kind of thinking is to consider competition—what other agencies or groups or community organizations are working on the same issues, addressing the same problems? This can be an uncomfortable question but what you learn can be valuable in program planning and in submitting proposals.

It’s not likely, but it happens, that a nonprofit wins a grant from a foundation only to discover that the money can’t be used as proposed. Maybe so much time has elapsed between the proposal and the award that the original problem no longer exists. Maybe there are no applicants for the scholarships that have been funded. Maybe community leaders have found another way to deliver services. Perhaps it will take longer than expected to complete the project.

Nonprofits addressing economic and social justice themes—in fact, virtually all nonprofits—ought to be familiar with the term. It was introduced by scholar and advocate Kimberle Williams Crenshaw in 1989 and it has its roots in civil rights activism and scholarship, and in the lives and lessons of DuBois, Douglass and Truth. And it’s turning up in the conversations between funders, community organizations and others who want to use grants to change the world.

MYTH: If I give a building, vehicle, computer, book I wrote, or whatever to the nonprofit and later close the nonprofit, I can just change the copyright, deed, or title back into my name again, or take the property back.