Bogoljub Karic: How Foundations and Grants Can Help Your Non-Profit Organization

Aside from generating donations from campaigns and benefits, I, Bogoljub Karic, also recommend that you try to find charitable foundations that provide funds and great resources for non-profits. There is a huge abundance of foundations that share the same advocacies as non-profits, which give out donations that significantly help further their social missions. But how do you get access to these funding and grants?

Basically, it is pretty much the same as how you approach individuals, so it is essential that you know what you are specifically looking for and what foundations would be interested in what you are doing therefore, you should do some research to find out the types of non-profits your target foundations, whether public or private, have supported and helped in the past, as they can be very explicit in their interests. Once you have done this, you can then move on to working on establishing relationships with those who make funding decisions.

It is worth asking for an institution’s donation criteria to see know if you are a fit, as they are often inundated with requests. Remember that there are large independent foundations which are not likely to give to smaller non-profit organizations and larger corporations that tend to have charitable objectives. There are also many charitable foundations that help and support local non-profit organizations monetarily. These institutions should be the ones you should definitely target. These are extremely approachable and often provide small non-profits with skills to help them in the long term; such as board training, negotiating, planning, grant writing, etc.

Foundations can also help grant you funds for particular things, such as a strategic planning retreat. Even if you fail to obtain funding from these sources, they usually let you know how you can improve your chances and where you went wrong, alongside information on their grant cycles and decision criteria. When it comes to trying to earn a grant, it is vital that you get the pitch right. Once you have pin-pointed out an institution that you think may grant you funds, unless you have experience, it’s worth hiring someone to help you out in writing a grant proposal if you can afford it. On the other hand, there are plenty of books to help with this and you can also keep an eye out for local grant-writing seminars.