Get More Grants: Grant Training Webinar Series
The Center is pleased to partner with the Alliance of Arizona Nonprofits to offer the six-webinar series, Get More Grants.
April 17, 2018 - Quick-Start Guide to the One-Page Grant Proposal
April 24, 2018 - Making Friends with Funders
July 18, 2018 - Budget Building for Grantwriters
July 25, 2018 - Power Writing for Nonprofits
October 10, 2018 - Grants Research: Finding 'Sweet-Spot' Funders
October 17, 2018 - Inside the Grantmaker's Black Box
All webinars are 12:00-1:30 pm (EST). Webinars are available individually: $35 for Center Members and $45 for all others; or discounted as a series: $180 for Center Members and $240 for all others.
Quick-Start Guide to the One-Page Grant Proposal: 10 Questions to Jump-Start Your Grants Success
Do you have a good idea you'd like to turn into a grant proposal but you’re not sure how to start? Join veteran grants pro and grantmaker Maryn Boess to learn how to turn your good idea into a fundable project concept by answering 10 simple, all-important questions.
- Share the deceptively simple one-page Magic Wand template that's won grants of $2,000, $30,000, $144,000, and more for nonprofits like yours.
- Discover six powerful ways nonprofits have put this Magic Wand to work for the causes they serve.
- Learn seven questions that bring clarity, depth, and power to your own best thinking about a successful project or funding need.
- Learn eight questions that give you "x-ray vision" into the minds of grantmakers so you can deliver exactly what they want, every time.
- Learn the one question that helps you zero in on grantmakers most likely to say "YES!" to your funding requests.
- Bust a few grantseeking myths such as the A+ Proposal, the Hard-Working Grantmaker, and It's-Just-Wrong-to-Be-Messy.
BONUS: Suffering from writer’s block? Learn a simple, powerful technique for busting through writer's block and liberating your own creative forces (and those of your team members) to bring forth your clearest, most comprehensive, and compelling thinking around your grants projects.
Making Friends with Funders: What Grantmakers Want Every Grantwriter to Know Before Submitting a Proposal
Make no mistake about it - grantseeking is a people-driven process - and key to your success is the grantmakers themselves. But who are these people? How do we connect with them? And what do they want from us? Being a grantmaker isn't as easy as you might think. In this webinar, presenter Maryn Boess will draw from her own grantmaking experience (and that of dozens of other program officers, reviewers, and decision-makers) to share a realistic look at what it takes to create funder relationships that are authentic, high-integrity, and that work for you. You’ll learn:
- What grantmakers really want most of all as organizations and as individuals.
- What it means to “think through the grantmaker’s eyes”.
- The challenges that program officers and review teams face in their decision-making.
- Four keys to persuasive proposals and how each connects with the reader’s own personal sense of purpose.
- How a proposal makes a good or bad first impression in just a few seconds and why.
- The three powerhouse proposal sections that must pull their own weight - and then some - for your proposal to work.
- The principle of limited mental energy and how it applies to the choices we make in crafting proposals.
- You'll also meet my friend grumpy grantmaker, and learn about the 12-12-12 Scenario and the Systematic Proposal Buzz-Phrase Synthesizer, and much more.
Budget Building for Grantwriters: The Total Value Framework for Crafting an Unbeatable Project Budget
At the heart of every mission-driven grant proposal stands a mission-driven budget. A good budget provides an honest, complete, and clear picture of all the resources necessary to perform the proposed work. It is also an invaluable management and evaluation tool for the grant-funded program. So how do we get there from here? Join this webinar to learn:
- Why you should never plan your proposal budget using the grantmaker’s form and what you can use instead.
- Using a real-life scenario, the six major budget categories, key issues and challenges you can expect to run into in each one, and thinking through some of the situations.
- How grantmakers evaluate your proposal budget and what it tells them about your organization.
- The importance of taking a "total value” approach to budget building, clearly and compellingly showing the value of everything it takes to do your work successfully.
- And we’ll clear away the confusion around the value of volunteer time, accounting for a “match,” handling administrative/indirect costs, and other perennially perplexing budget issues.
BONUS: We’ll share the GrantsMagic U’s exclusive Master Budget Planning Checklist and Worksheet, a planning tool to help craft a budget that is comprehensive, realistic, and bullet-proof – and that will work for you, your organization, and your grantmaking partners.
Power Writing for Nonprofits: Principles of Clarity and Structure
Clear, compelling writing is vital to all your professional writing projects – not just grant proposals. Join this webinar to learn and practice simple, powerful, and often overlooked techniques that will have you writing more clearly, quickly, and confidently. Topics include:
- Big myths and misconceptions that could be sabotaging your writing without your even knowing it.
- Three fundamental strategies for writing so clearly your reader cannot possibly misunderstand your message.
- Key techniques and tools to help you organize your material for maximum impact.
- Ten steps for busting through the deadly 12-12-12 Scenario and bringing your writing to life.
- Figuring out who your readers are, what they need from you, and how to deliver it.
- Advice from the top writing pros on editing, proofreading, and revising.
BONUS RESOURCE: Everything Else You Always Wanted to Know About Good Writing (But Never Had the Chance to Ask)
Grants Research with a Twist: Five Unconventional Strategies for Finding More 'Sweet-Spot' Funders
Did you know there are over 120,000 grantmaking organizations in the U.S. alone? That’s good news! The bad news: fewer than 1/10 of 1% of them have any interest in seeing a proposal from your organization. Don’t take it personally. More good news: that 1/10 of 1% still leaves plenty of grantmakers – “sweet spot” funders – who would be happy to consider supporting your organization’s work.
Thoughtful funder research can help you cut through all the “no thank you’s” and quickly zero in on that smaller group in your organization’s sweet spot who are most likely to give your proposal an enthusiastic thumbs-up. We’ll also discuss:
- Mission match, which is a great start to your funder research. However, some of your best prospective grantmaking partners may have no specific interest in your organization’s mission.
- Five ways beyond mission match to frame your work that will connect you with five completely different groups of potential funders.
- Using two-fers and three-fers (maybe even four-fers) to power up your connection with sweet spot funders.
- A real-life scenario: how our unconventional, simple tweaks helped a struggling nonprofit turn up 12 new-to-them sweet spot funders resulting in over $100,000 in grant awards.
BONUS: The two best sources for all your grants research and they’re both free!
Inside the Grantmaker's Black Box: What Really Happens After You Push SUBMIT on Your Proposals
You know the feeling on deadline day, when you finally push SUBMIT and say farewell to your lovingly-crafted, mission-critical grant proposal as it vanishes for weeks, months, sometimes forever as you wait to find out whether it’s funded or not. That space between "submit" and "notification" is what we call the Grantmaker’s Black Box, where all the work goes on for the grantmaking team. Yet for those on the grantseeking side, what happens inside the Black Box is virtually invisible.
Join this webinar with veteran grants officer Maryn Boess for a journey into the heart of the Grantmaker's Black Box. You’ll get an up-close look into her own organization’s recent grantmaking cycle on the way to awarding a total of $600,000, including the challenges, stresses, frustrations, surprises, internal timelines, twists and turns the grantmaking team experienced. The insights and takeaways might give you an edge in your own grants success.
About the Presenter
Maryn Boess is a veteran nonprofit professional, social entrepreneur, and leader in capacity building and grantsmanship training. Over her 20-year career in the nonprofit world, she has been an on-staff program developer and grantwriter; independent grants consultant; grants project manager; grants trainer; grants reviewer; author, speaker, mentor, and coach; and, for the past 10 years, a grantmaker, managing up to $2 million annually for K-12 education in the Southwest. Her grant proposals won more than $42 million for her clients in a single ten-year period.
Since 2000, she has focused on creating and delivering a portfolio of high quality, low-cost grants information tools, resources, and workshops shared by nonprofits nationwide. Launched in 2015, GrantsMagic U is the virtual academy she created to make her extensive portfolio of practical and inspiring trainings on successful grantsmanship available (and affordable!) for anyone, anytime, anywhere. Maryn moved from Arizona to the Pacific Northwest in 2011 and travels nationally to offer her workshops on practical strategies for healthy, successful grantseeking.