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GrantProse, Inc., Newsletter
August 19, 2009
Vol. 2, No. 16
Newsletter Editor: Rita Lewis
North Carolina's leading newsletter for information on grants.
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Dear Colleagues,
The GrantProse vision is to provide high quality, personalized services and resources that are reasonably priced and widely accessible. Toward this end, we provide this newsletter free and hope you will forward it to your colleagues. We welcome your suggestions--please email ideas to Rita Lewis, newsletter editor.
We continue to make progress with redesigning the GrantProse website. We've added a new feature of archiving these newsletters. If you've lost track of a website address that we shared, now you can find the newsletter in our Archive. We continue to support favorite links such as Grant Alerts and Web Resources in a more user-friendly environment that provides you the latest and best information on grant development resources.
Bill CarruthersGrantProse, Inc.
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ARRA and NC
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News on stimulus funding and North Carolina
Recovery Workshops for Small Business Continue
The NC Office of Economic Recovery and Investment (OERI) continues its series of three-hour workshops for historically underutilized businesses (HUBs), including minority and small businesses. As part of its statewide awareness campaign, OERI is reaching out to these groups via workshops and other means to offer information and help with funding opportunities available through ARRA. The remaining three workshops are scheduled for Raleigh (September 16), Hickory (September 23) and Rocky Mount (September 30).
Grants.gov Webinar Series
Grants.gov is concluding a three-part webinar series on finding and applying for Recovery Act funding through the Grants.gov system. As of August 20, website visitors will be able to view recordings of all three webinars. Visit the Grants.gov webinar page for links to recordings, presentations and webinar Q&As.
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Bulletin Board
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August 27, 2009. Grants Information Network (GIN) of NC meeting, 9-11 am. Visit GIN's webpage for directions and the agenda of what promises to be a very important meeting. The workgroup that has been developing a proposal for reorganizing GIN as a legal entity will present its progress to date. This is a great opportunity to discuss the future of GIN--and perhaps witness the birth of a new organization!
August-September, 2009. The Council on Entrepreneurial Development, in partnership with the Small Business Technology Development Center, will offer a three-part training program focused on starting and growing a company via local and federal grant funding. The first session is focused on connecting with local and federal granting sources. The second session will provide an entrepreneur's perspective on grants and tips on preparing a grant proposal and identifying funding sources. The third session will offer one-on-one counseling sessions with expert grant writers and specialists. Visit CED's website for more information on the workshops, which will be held August 20, September 10 and September 24.
October 2009. GrantProse will conduct its popular two-day training program for intermediate to experienced grant writers. This program features an emphasis on practice--writing text in response to typical sections of a proposal, along with sharing your work for critique. Exact dates for the training will be announced in this newsletter. |
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In the Spotlight
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What Are Your Chances?
The US Department of Education (ED) recently announced its awards in the Safe Schools Healthy Students (SS/HS) discretionary grant program. Information ED provided to applicants indicated that the department had received 422 applications and funded 29--approximately 6% of the applications. The winning grant proposals received rating scores of 98.67 out of 100 possible points; many high scoring applications were not funded.
When considering whether to prepare a grant proposal, you must assess your probability of success. While "winning" is your goal, it will help your peace of mind to appreciate that the process of preparing a grant proposal is a learning process. Even if your chances are long and you don't win, you should appreciate the value in the secondary benefits of making the effort, such as forming a better understanding of the problem, making connections with new partners and developing new approaches to old problems. When members of an organization decide to prepare a proposal, grant writers should discuss their chances of winning and help them understand the benefits they will gain just from developing the proposal. Win or lose, an ultimate goal is to build organizational capacities.
Thanks to Lori Brown of Buncombe County Schools for sharing the information about SS/HS. Her school district, facing stiff competition, did not win that grant. But against even longer odds, a proposal she developed did win a Shade Structure grant from the American Academy of Dermatology. The Buncombe County Schools Foundation was one of only 34 winners among more than 1,000 applicants. Congratulations to Lori!
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Guest Column
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Begin with the End in Mind
By Michele Oros
Effective grant writers, like effective leaders, visualize the goal of a project at its conception and align all components of a proposal toward accomplishing that end. A well-crafted needs assessment presents both general and targeted data that frame the context of a project and establish current baselines. Evaluating the degree to which a project attains its goal requires integrating data-generating activities throughout the program design to provide ongoing feedback and support any programming revisions needed to keep a project on course.
Academicians are trained to regard grant proposals as research efforts. The term "PI," or Primary Investigator, is commonly used in the higher education and scientific communities to denote the individual responsible for coordinating a project and analyzing its impact. However, grant seekers other than college and university faculty often view themselves as project directors or grant managers, focused more on implementing programs than conducting research. Regardless of leadership form, almost every grant proposal requires an evaluation plan to measure the impact of a project.
Evaluation measures in K-12, nonprofit and local government projects frequently include attendance rosters from training workshops, purchase orders for instructional resources and contact logs with parents or stakeholders. While these documents help monitor the deployment of program strategies and activities (often called outputs), they do little to capture the results of an effort (often called outcomes). Although the impact of new programs or resources can be difficult to isolate and quantify, grant seekers in all fields are increasingly expected to design projects with measurable outputs and outcomes that indicate the degree to which activities have affected the target audience and accomplished stated goals. Investing in the creation of a strong evaluation component while writing the grant proposal will lead to improving your chances of receiving a grant award.
Michele Oros has written and managed grant-funded projects for Beaufort County Schools since 2003. She also helps organizations in her community find and obtain grants, and teaches grant-writing workshops through NC's community college system.
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Tips & Resources
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Data, Data, Data
Every grant writer needs demographic data, employment
statistics and other facts to support arguments for funding, but finding the
data is often a challenge. DataFerrett can help you locate and retrieve relevant data from
the Internet, regardless of where the data are located. Think of it as Google
for data: census data, economic data, data on health, income, unemployment,
population, labor . . . the list goes on. DataFerret accesses information from
the DataWeb, a network
of online data libraries. One of the datasets available from DataFerret is the American Community Survey,
a survey that the US Census Bureau sends to a sample of the population every
year. Especially helpful when the next complete census is years away, ACS
offers an evolving picture of what the population looks like and how it lives:
estimates of demographic, housing, social and economic characteristics for all
states and population groups of 65,000 people or more.
The US Census Bureau's Guide to Census Tract Resources offers online
information on locating census tracts and block numbering areas (BNAs); a way
to match addresses to census tracts and BNAs; and listings of 1990 qualifying
poverty census tracts. The bureau's Data Access Tools is a web page with links to many sources of
information, including the American FactFinder (an interactive application that supports the economic census
and the latest population estimates), State & County QuickFacts (frequently
requested Census Bureau information from the national to the city level) and
the US Gazetteer
(place name and ZIP code search engine).
The online SMART System of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (US
Department of Justice) was developed to support the early identification of
emerging local issues, and to provide resources to help local governments and
other decision makers make long-term and rapid-response plans. The system is
GIS (Geographic Information System) based, which allows users to drill down to
the census tract level to access data for social indicators such as crime,
juvenile delinquency and community distress. Users, who must create an account,
can view and save the data in several forms (maps, tables, scatter graphs,
reports, etc.)
Get LinkedIn with GIN
The Grants Information Network (GIN) of North Carolina has established a professional networking group with LinkedIn, affording you more opportunities to network and share information about developing grant proposals and managing grant programs. If you already have a LinkedIn account, search for "Grants Information Network (GIN) of North Carolina" using the "Search Groups" query and then request to join the group. If you do not have an account, sign up for one for free on LinkedIn, and then search for the GIN group and request to join. If you have questions about GIN on LinkedIn, please email RV Rikard.
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Grant Opportunities
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Deadline: 9/25/09
Program: NASA K-12 Cooperative Agreement Grant
Agency: NASA Office of Education
Description: Funding to leverage NASA's content in
STEM areas with educational expertise in providing or enabling secondary
education instruction.
Award Amount: $750,000-$1,500,000
Website: Grants.gov
Eligibility: K-12 (schools, LEAs and SEAs), nonprofits
Deadline: 10/8/09
Program: Recovery Act Local Energy Assurance Planning (LEAP) Initiative
Agency: National Energy Technology Laboratory
Description: Funding to create jobs at
the local level and allow cities to have well-developed, standardized energy
assurance and resiliency plans to rely upon during energy emergencies and
supply disruptions.
Award Amount: $60,000-$300,000
Website: Grants.gov
Eligibility: Government agencies
New grant alerts have been uploaded to the GrantProse website. To view these and many more opportunities, visit www.GrantProseInc.com.
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