will succeed.

If you doubt success from the start, you

will fail. The applicable behavioral principle is the
notion of the ‘‘self-fulfilling prophesy.’’ In essence, it
says, ‘‘What you believe will happen.’’ Many like you
have already mastered the grants process. We believe
you too can be a successful grantseeker.
Organizational Attitudes
Grant Myths. Many nonprofit organizations harbor
misconceptions about grantseeking that serve as
formidable internal barriers to winning grants. Some
common myths that need to be debunked include
the following.
Myth: People will fund my needs. Sponsors fund
their needs, not yours. When writing proposals, you
must show you can become a change agent to solve a
problem important to them. For example, as a school
official you may want a new computer laboratory.
Sponsors are apt to be much less interested in your
perceived needs than an opportunity to support a
project that will train computer-literate children in
the new century. Put differently, sponsors care more
about innovative ways to teach children than they
do about buying computers.
Myth: You can run a program on grants forever.
Sustained grant support over many years is difficult
to obtain. Start-up project support is the easiest to
find and operating support is the most difficult. While
project support can be successfully parlayed over
many years, it is usually segmented into different
phases or is periodically redefined if it is to be
sustained.
Myth: Use the weasel words that people want to hear.
There are no magic buzzwords to sprinkle in your
proposal. ‘‘In’’ words today go ‘‘out’’ tomorrow. Don’t
be concerned about using vogue words. The simple,
honest, direct approach is best.
Organizational Benefits. Organizations pursue grants
for many financial and administrative reasons. For
instance, grants will provide budget relief through
the direct and the indirect costs they provide.
Often, grant money can be leveraged to attract
additional funds from other sources. Beyond these
fiscal considerations, receiving grants can have considerable
public relations value for your organization.
This, in turn, can bring zest to your recruitment program,
making it easier to attract new talent to your
organization.
Organizational Barriers. Agencies entering the grants
arena must recognize and respond to one very
important principle of behavior, namely, organization
prevents reorganization. This means the very fact that
you are organized one way makes it difficult to organize
another way. And yet, commitment to a successful
grants program means that organizational priorities
may need to change. Time and resources will be allocated
differently. New systems and procedures will be
implemented, as discussed below.
Resistance to change is natural and can be minimized
by showing individuals how their job satisfaction
will increase. Perhaps the best motivators for
employees are the achievement, the recognition, the
work itself, and the responsibility. One of people’s
greatest needs is the ability to achieve, and through
achievement, experience psychological growth. Your
task is to control and increase the effectiveness of
the motivators within your organization that induce
growth. Grants enable you to do things that you would
not otherwise be able to do within your organization,
or at least not as quickly.
Motivating Others within Your Organization. Work
smarter, not harder. Encourage others to join your
grantseeking activities. These suggestions will help
you secure ‘‘buy-in’’ from your colleagues.
• Have a central administrator issue a policy memo
indicating that grant writing is encouraged, indeed
expected, within the organization.
• Give people time, resources, and training to write
grants.
• Recognize and reward grant activities within the
organization. For instance, writing grants should
be one of the factors considered when awarding
promotions and raises.
• Use the in-house newsletter or letters from a central
administrator to praise grant writers on their efforts.
• Share your grant knowledge with others in your
organization. Remember, enthusiasm is contagious.
• Start small and build. Pick a few people to become
the in-house grant experts. As they develop and
experience success, others will want to get involved
also.
As you work with colleagues in your organization,
help them build realistic expectations about grantseeking;
otherwise, their false expectations will produce
disappointments and disincentives for pursuing
grants. For instance, supervisors must recognize that
it takes approximately six to nine months to find out
whether a federal grant has been funded. If bosses
expect a decision soon after submitting a proposal,
they will be needlessly disappointed. Foundation Roles
Foundations see themselves in multiple roles; five are
identified below, along with sample proposal language
that reflects these differing values.
As grantmakers, foundations provide direct financial
resources that target immediate or emerging concerns.
As a grantmaker, you perform an incalculable service
by helping groups and individuals foster lasting
improvement in the human condition.
As catalysts, foundations help mobilize leaders and
constituencies.
An extraordinary convergence of community need
and immediate opportunity motivates us to seek your
investment in triggering an overdue change—the primary
reason for our special request. From a broader
perspective, this proposal is a catalytic change agent
to impact the lives of a vulnerable population through
fierce dedication and warm compassion.
As community resources, foundations provide
services to donors, nonprofit organizations, and the
community-at-large.
Our proposal concentrates on helping people build
just and caring communities that nurture people,
spur enterprise, bridge differences, foster fairness,
and promote civility.
As resource developers, foundations build a permanent
unrestricted endowment.
This proposal develops crucial resources to build
better futures that more effectively meet the needs
of today’s vulnerable children and families. The
project outcomes will strengthen the support services,
social networks, physical infrastructure,
employment, self-determination, and economic
vitality of our target community.
As stewards, foundations receive and distribute
community resources.
You and I share something in common—a profound
stewardship responsibility to the local community.
Accordingly, this proposal invites your shared partnership
in making a difference.
To help determine which roles your target foundation
deems most important, read their ‘‘About Us’’
description on their Web site or mission statement in
their annual report. Next, use your preproposal
contacts (Chapter 4) to validate your first impressions
and base your appeals on those roles, since they
represent the psychological needs of foundations.
With these orienting perspectives on foundations,
we now turn our attention to print and electronic
information sources that explain funding priorities,
application protocols, and often grant histories.
THE FOUNDATION CENTER
The Foundation Center is an independent national
organization that provides information about philanthropic
giving. National collections exist in their
New York City headquarters and four field offices:
Atlanta, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Washington,
DC. Each location contains extensive reference materials
about foundations and the broad spectrum of
fundraising. Further, each state has one or more
regional foundation collections to service people in
its area—free. Each regional collection contains core
Foundation Center publications plus supplementary
information. To find the location of the collection
nearest you, visit www.foundationcenter.org/about/
locations.html or call the Foundation Center toll free
at 1-800-424-9836.
The following sections discuss the Foundation
Center print and electronic primary source materials.
The print materials can either be purchased or read
in your nearest regional foundation library. The electronic
references are available on CD-ROM or
through an online service, both at a fee. Details exist
at the Foundation Center Web site. Our discussion
of private foundation reference materials then turns
to information sources from other grant publishers.
Foundation Directory
The Foundation Directory is the private foundation
equivalent of the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance;
that is, the Foundation Directory is a primary
starting point to identify the larger foundations. For
instance, the 2007 edition features key facts on the
top 10,000 U.S. foundations by total giving—indexed
by name, types of support, subject field, state, key officials.
For ease of access, over 1,700 new entries to this
edition are also indexed. Enhanced with more than
50,000 recently awarded foundation grants, the
Directory provides valuable insight into foundation
giving priorities.
While the 10,000 largest grantmaking foundations
represent less than 15 percent of the total number
of existing foundations, they control more than
90 percent of all foundation assets and award more
than 80 percent of all foundation grants. The Foundation
Directory has been a basic prospect research tool‘‘profitable philanthropy’’; that is, they often fund
those projects that will bring them better products,
happier or healthier employees, lower costs, better
brand awareness, or good public relations—all things
from which they can benefit, the ‘‘What’s in it for
me’’ syndrome. As a corporate grantseeker, your challenge
is to describe your project in terms that will benefit
the corporation.
Example of Corporate General Philanthropy
Funding. Organizations can attract corporate funding
by making it a ‘‘win-win’’ situation for all. Recently,
the Healthy Baby Agency was concerned generally
about the high incidence of adolescent pregnancy in
its inner city, and more specifically was alarmed at
the low birth weight and poor nutrition received by
the newborns. Visiting nurses reported that mothers
were cutting off the end of the nipples on baby bottles
so the infants could consume their nourishment faster;
additionally, the nurses observed that the infant formula
consisted of sugar water instead of healthy
nutrients. The problem: these new mothers lacked
information on the benefits of good infant nutrition.
The Healthy Baby Agency went to a manufacturer of
baby food formula and gained $25,000 to develop a
video on infant nutrition that would be played for
mothers of newborns while they were in the hospital,
postdelivery. What was in it for the corporation?
Two things: their products were prominently
displayed during the filming of the video (but not
commercially plugged) and the corporation was
generously acknowledged during the credits at the
end of the video. This project was so successful, in
fact, that the corporation later sponsored additional
videos in languages other than English.
The Healthy Baby Agency found that crucial
point of ‘‘connect’’ with the corporation: an innovative
project that underscored the importance of their
corporate mission, namely, developing healthy babies.
The corporation was able to secure substantial publicity
from this project, letting others know what a good
corporate citizen they were. What is your point of
‘‘connect’’ with a corporation? These organizations
found ‘‘hot buttons’’ with corporations and were
successful in obtaining philanthropic support.
• A university approached a corporation that hires
many of its engineering graduates and obtained
funding for minority student scholarships.
• A museum first loaned paintings to help decorate a
new corporate office and then later received funding
for an art restoration project.
• A hospital received corporate support for a diabetes
research project from a corporation whose CEO
had a family history of diabetes.
How do you find your corporate ‘‘hot button?’’
Through prospect research.
Corporate Research and Development
(R&D) Funding
Approach to Corporate R&D Funding. Corporations
are ‘‘for-profit’’ firms. This descriptor pretty well sums
up the major purpose of any corporation—to make
money for its owners, who range from the sole
owner/entrepreneur of a small company simply looking
to support his family, to a large publicly traded
company holding millions of shares of stock. Corporate
R&D funding represents the pinnacle of profitable
philanthropy. Corporations fund those projects
for which they believe a long-term—but often ‘‘more
immediate’’—gain will be received.
Example of Corporate R&D Funding. Profitable
philanthropy worked for both parties in a recent case
where a university laboratory was conducting cuttingedge
research on sensors and their use in liquid environments.
The laboratory director approached an
automobile manufacturer and explained how the sensors
could detect when it was time to change the
oil in an automobile; that is, instead of changing the
oil automatically every 3,000 miles as most people do,
the research professor gave details how his sensors
could determine when the oil became dirty enough to
change regardless of miles driven, thereby more
efficiently reducing engine wear. The corporation supported
the R&D project and now includes the sensors
in all automobiles it manufactures. The research laboratory
received funding for their R&D project as well
as a nice revenue stream from royalty sales and patents.
It was a win-win situation for both parties.
Corporate Internet References
Foundation Center. At present, few direct sources of
corporate funding information reside on the Internet.
The Foundation Center maintains an online database
of corporate giving. This subscription-based service
profiles 3,700 companies, 2,700 company-sponsored
foundations, 1,400 direct corporate giving programs,
and records of 97,000 recently awarded grants. Further
details regarding Corporate Giving Online are available
at www.foundationcenter.org/findfunders/funding
sources/cgo.html. The online subscription databases