Grant Writing Guide for Nonprofits

How to Write an Effective Nonprofit Grant Application

The Grant Application Template takes the information we’ve learned from funders and gives you a pre-filled sample template for framing answers when applying for grants. By utilizing data, you’ll be able to tell impactful stories and build effective applications.

Applying for grants can be a daunting task. Many nonprofit leaders go into the grant-writing process asking themselves, “We want to apply for a capacity-building grant, but how do we do that? What are funders even looking for that my nonprofit can provide?”

According to our recent Foundation Reporting Study, foundations and charitable trusts are requiring nonprofit organizations to show how they impact their communities and constituents. The best way to show that impact is through collecting relevant data from your service delivering and reporting on it over time.

Ryan Colas, VP of Inside Sales at Social Solutions, explains it as “impact investing”. Instead of simply giving based on mission or location, funders want to actually gauge the change nonprofits are creating in the communities they are investing in. “The only way to be able to gauge that change is to have a tracking system at the nonprofit level that allows [nonprofits] to quantify [their] interactions with clients and see real change over time.”

In fact, reporting requirements have risen in the last five years and are only slated to increase in the next five years. So, having robust reporting in place at your organization is essential to proving your impact and gaining more funding. Ryan puts it this way – “being able to tell what you’ve done in the past will enable you to get more funding for the future.”

Once your nonprofit is ready to apply for funding, it’s important to showcase the data you collect and report on to prove that your nonprofit’s impact is important, scalable, and something worth investing in.

We wanted to make it as easy as possible for you to get more funding for your organization, so we compiled a grant application template (portions were adapted from Gateway Center for Giving’s Common Application) with some of our favorite, best-practice components and common questions to address during the application process. In this template, you’ll find a short sample grant application and fill in the blank prompts you can use to layout your organization’s needs in a concise way so you can be well on your way to proving your impact!

Download our Award Winning Nonproft Kit and get started today!