Grantwriting for Nonprofits at Catalyst Cafe

On Tuesday night, I gave a brief run down of the Pima County Public Library's resources for researching and writing a nonprofit grant proposal to a private funder. The first stop a grant seeker should make is to check out the library's Grants & Nonprofit Info Center page. We have tons of free workshops and trainings related to grant seeking and writing right on the front page. You can also sign up for a free eNewsletter to receive grant opportunities for Pima County nonprofits.

You may also want to do your own research. Access to our grants research databases is available at all of our library branches. You can use a library computer or sign in through our WiFi to access the databases on our website. The Foundation Directory Online profiles over 110,000 grantmakers that give throughout the U.S., and it has data visualization tools available to help determine if a funder gives in the geographic region your project is occurring and what types of projects that they've funded in the past. I recommend that new grant seekers use the "Search Grantmakers" tab and focus on the "Field of Interest," the "Geographic Focus," and the "Types of Support" boxes.

The Arizona Guide to Grants database has over 1,800 profiles of grantmakers who have a stated giving preference in Arizona or a past history of giving to nonprofits in Arizona. One of the key features of this database that I love is the "Upcoming deadlines" link. You can find tutorials for these databases on the right hand side of the page.

If you're ready to write your proposal but aren't sure where to start, take a look at our page. In the presentation, I also highlighted a few of my favorite resources for writing help. Here they are again!

Grantspace
 This resource provides access to free online webinars, sample proposals and other sample documents, a “Get Answers” section, archived live chats and videos that will give you tips on strengthening your proposal. 

Tools & Resources for Assessing Social Impact (TRASI)
Find ready-to-use tools and learn what leading nonprofits, foundations, and others are using to measure their impact. This is very useful for the “Evaluation” section in your proposal.

Arizona Common Grant Application 
This form was developed by a committee of the Arizona Grantmakers Forum to facilitate the application process within Arizona. It effectively streamlines the grantseeking process by allowing nonprofits to create one application that can be submitted to multiple funders.

Now Available: Compare ~40 Crowdfunding Platforms

Last month's panel on online fundraising was one of the best yet! If you missed it, one of the handouts was a chart that Kassy and I created that compares nearly 40 different tools, or platforms, for online fundraising. It is now online for anyone to use: Crowdfunding Platform Comparison Chart, created by Lisa Bunker and Kassy Rodeheaver for Pima County Public Library.

We discovered enormous variance in the uses and rules about who may fundraise, and how. Individuals? Yes. Businesses? Yes. Non-501(3)C organizations? Yes. There seems to be a tool for everyone. There is a wide variety of fees assessed too.

The other thing that we thought hard about was how one might assess the reliability of these new companies, so included in the chart are two approaches: 1) we looked the company up in the BBB, and 2) We looked at the "Alexa rank," an indicator of how popular a website is relative to the rest of internet traffic. A low rank number equates to high traffic, and high numbers mean it is little-used. The idea there was to see if the website was actually being used, and talked about.

The chart is the first I've seen for this purpose, so please share it widely, and let people know it came from your library!