Define Your Project
How to Get a Grant: The Very First Step
So, you want to secure a grant from a foundation. You know that you’ll need to identify some prospects. You’ll need to make contact with foundation staff. You’ll need to submit a proposal.
But before you do any of that, there is one critical first step. You need to answer two essential questions:
- What is my project?
- How will it make my community a better place?
Before you begin to look for foundation prospects and certainly before you start communicating with foundations, you need to know – and be able to articulate – what you plan to do and why you plan to do it. This may seem obvious, but it is a step that is surprisingly frequently overlooked.
How do you answer these questions? The first question is all about defining your project. What is it that you want to do? How will you do it? You don’t need to have every detail worked out in the beginning, but you must be able to articulate what it is that you propose to do in a clear and specific way. For example:
- “WDEI wants to expand coverage of and discussion about health issues in our community.”
- “WDEI needs to buy and install a new transmitter in order to expand our reach and service to the people of our community.”
- “WDEI proposes to launch a series of online and in-person studio concerts featuring emerging local artists.”
You must know what it is that you want to do. And you must know why you want to do it. For example:
- “Twenty-six percent of people in our community do not have health insurance and 19 percent of children do not have a primary care provider. WDEI will create intensive and ongoing coverage of health issues in order to help our community respond in informed and creative ways to these and other health issues.”
- “WDEI is an important and valued resource in our community, with audience growth of 22 percent over the past five years. By installing a new transmitter, we will be able to expand our reach and service to an additional 35,000 people in our community and the surrounding area.”
What if your station is requesting general operating support? The same questions apply, but this time, your station is the project. You need to be able to articulate (succinctly) what your station does and why/how it makes a difference within your community.
Defining your project is not only essential in the grant solicitation process, but it also helps avoid the trap of designing projects to fit the funding. Yes, you may need to tweak your project or its deliverables to satisfy a funder, but you don’t want to be in the position of creating projects just to get money. If you start out of the gate clear about what your projects are, you will be in a much better position to secure funding for work that is consistent with your mission and in line with your priorities.
Here are some useful questions to ask as you define your project(s):
- How would I summarize the project in one sentence?
- How does this project reflect our overall mission?
- What will a grant enable us to do or achieve that we could not have done otherwise?
- What are the activities that will occur as part of this project?
- What personnel, tools or resources do I need to implement this project?
- What is a rough estimate of the budget for this project (specific budgeting can be done later)?
- How will we be able to determine if this project was successful?
- What will the impact of this project be? How will this project make a difference?
