My Approach
Grant Central Station’s approach to grant writing gets you where you want to go
Grant Central Station prepares you to create better proposals by concentrating on four key elements:
Getting clear on what makes you special. You already possess the vision, the commitment, the experience, and zeal to create a compelling picture of your community’s needs and solutions. Tapping into these helps you focus on your strengths and distinctiveness as an organization or nation. By communicating your unique “spark” with clarity and heart, you focus on growth and attract the right funders to you.
Integrating grant writing into the way that you work. Grant writing needs to be an ongoing process—one that doesn’t start just when you begin to write a proposal and doesn’t end when you get the funds. By building project research, planning, and evaluation practices—the foundation of strong proposals—into your ongoing work, you’re always ready to write your next grant, and you won’t tire yourself out with any more late night sprints to the deadline!
Planning from the ground up. Many approaches to grant writing make use of one-size-fits-all project elements, but it’s important that your proposal grow from the ground up. Your strongest proposals have their roots in your organization and your community…they remember your mission…incorporate the input of staff…create lasting partnerships with other agencies…and have the buy-in of those you serve.
Breaking down proposals into manageable step-by-step chunks. Getting a handle on the basic parts of a proposal is possible with practice. By focusing on each required section separately at first, you won’t confuse your goals with your objectives or your outcomes with your outputs. You’ll gain a deeper understanding of what makes your project hang together and achieve its goal. In fact, once you learn the language of proposals, you may even enjoy working on them!
This approach comes from years of writing proposals with rather than for my clients and differs from what I’ve found in other grant writing books and manuals.
It begins where you begin—with a desire for change or growth, which is another way of saying, a hope or a dream to better your community.
It focuses on seeing the opportunity you present to funders and on building ways of encouragng them to want to invest in your solution.
It soaches you on building strong proposals with a series of questions and exercises.
If Grant Central Station’s approach interests you and you’d like to give it a try, click here to download Writing Letters of Inquiry that Get a Response free of charge.
If you’re still not sure this approach is right for you, you may want to learn more about The Myth of the Hit or Miss Proposal.