Stay Safe AND Dream Big – on Promises to Grant Funders

You want to impress potential funders with what you can accomplish if funded, and you want to aim high because you are doing this work to radically improve the world – but you don’t want to over-promise and under-deliver, then risk not getting your grant renewed for a second year. So what do you do? Will funders be understanding if you don’t reach the high standards you set?

Generally, funders want to know what you will achieve with their support, not what you hope for, but may not reach. I have created a system I use with many of my clients to balance their internal aspirations with their promises to funders.

Before explaining it, I’ll define the usual grant terms for those who don’t know them, and those who do can skip this list.

• Objectives are measurable promises to funders about what your organization will do by the end of the grant period, like how many people you will serve.
• Outcomes are measurable promises to funders about what will change for those you serve because of the work you did by the end of the grant period, like improvements in their health.
• Indicators or benchmarks of success are measures that will show your work was successful by the end of the grant period; it is best for them to be a mix of objectives and outcomes.
• Funders who ask for indicators or benchmarks of success generally use them instead of objectives or outcomes. Some funders ask only for objectives and use the term to include outcomes or ask only for outcomes and use the term to include objectives. You only need to consider the difference between the terms if they ask for both, otherwise, it is best to include a mix of objectives and outcomes under whatever term they use.

 So how high should you aim in your objectives/outcomes/indicators of success section?

I recommend 10-15% below what you expect to achieve. This way, if everything goes as planned, you can report to funders how fabulously you succeeded, exceeding your promises. If obstacles come up, you are likely to still be able to say you achieved what you promised to do.

And what about your big dreams? Anything you are not extremely confident you can achieve, set as an aspiration. This is not official grant lingo, but an additional term I created. Agree within your organization on the top aspirations, so anyone who has a chance can work toward them, and you will be more likely to achieve them. Do not include your aspirations in grant proposals or donor materials, since you do not want to have to report that they were not accomplished. However, if they are achieved, absolutely do add them to your grant reports, annual report, appeals, etc.

This system of working with promises and aspirations supports you to both stay safe with funders and achieve your big dreams about how you want to change the world.

Stand Out Amongst Similar Groups –
Without Making Them Look Bad

You want to show how positively your work stands out among similar groups, but it can be hard to do that without making someone else look bad. It can seem like you have to choose between saying something negative about another, or avoiding the real truth and not getting to show something positive about your organization. Revealing this positive aspect of your organization might make all the difference in getting the clients, customers, participants, donations, or grants you are seeking. It may be absolutely necessary to describe how you compare favorably with others, so your reader knows to choose you amongst all of the options. Yet if you make someone else look bad, then instead of readers seeing your excellence in comparison, they might just see you as having a negative attitude, at best, or as downright vain, gossipy, and mean, at worst. So how do you make yourself look good without making anyone else look bad?

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How to Write About People Who Don’t Share Your Values

If part of your work involves dealing with people who oppose the values of your mission, it can be difficult to talk about them without implying judgment of them and their choices and behaviors that you strongly feel to be wrong. Yet, allowing those judgments to show can cause problems. Here are some thoughts and tips for addressing this tricky topic.

Let’s start with a fictional example:

Area business owners generally do not want to hire and make concessions for people with disabilities, so staff from The Strong Disabled try to change their minds with free consultation and research about the benefits of hiring people with disabilities.

This paints the business owners as selfish, uncompassionate, and even prejudiced… which some of them might actually be. Yet, describing them this way could earn their distrust or even animosity if they ever found out. Even if you can be certain they will never know, this description does not serve the nonprofit in the reader’s eyes either, for it does not give the reader confidence that the nonprofit can understand and persuade these business owners. In fact, the business owners just sound like bad people, and readers may feel that people with disabilities are better off without the possibility of having to work for such employers.

 

So what is the solution?

Even if you believe someone’s thinking to be absolutely wrong, you can still write in a way that shows compassion for the reasons behind their thinking.

Here are two fictional examples:

Many area business owners fear that they cannot afford to make the concessions needed to hire people with disabilities. The Strong Disabled eases their fears by offering researched data about the economic benefits of hiring people with disabilities and providing free consultation on cost-efficient ways create a disability-friendly workplace, including how to obtain funding for the process.

Many area business owners have absorbed cultural notions of what people with disabilities can and cannot do, leading them to believe that hiring people with disabilities would not benefit their businesses. The Strong Disabled corrects these misperceptions with free consultation and research about the many excellent benefits of hiring people with disabilities.

What may seem at first like unconscionable selfishness or prejudice can actually be seen and addressed as issues like fear and misinformation. If the business owners saw these examples, they would likely feel heard and understood and would not take offense. This way of addressing the problem also shows readers that the business owners are not just innately bad people, but people like anyone else, who can make misinformed decisions, then correct those mistakes. It also gives the reader confidence that the nonprofit understands how the business owners think and how to meet them where they are and give them the guidance and tools they need to learn and grow.

There may certainly be times when you do want to make someone else look bad, like when you are calling out a government for human rights abuse or a policy advocacy group for promoting a bill that would harm the poor to help the rich get richer. However, it is generally important to avoid saying anything negative about those you are working with or alongside. Fortunately, it is possible to express your values while also expressing compassion for and understanding of people whose actions go against those values.

Writing with Confidence that’s Contagious to Your Reader

How confident should mission-based writing be? You need to make your reader feel confident in your work and in you, even when you may be writing about things you are unsure of, like what you can do with funding you’re not at all sure you will be awarded. How do you balance your fear of over-promising with the need to promise enough to entice participation and support? Does it sound like vain assumption to write like you are sure your work will be funded, or does it sound insecure to write like you’re not sure? If you come off either too insecure or too vain, then no matter how well you demonstrate the merits of your work, you will turn people off and won’t be successful.

Let’s start by thinking about what it looks like to write too humbly. How many words or phrases do you see in the example below that express uncertainty?

Birch Park is just a small wildlife refuge with a few educational programs, but we believe that if you decide to fund us, we should be able to maintain our paths and clean up litter every week or so. We will also try to start keeping records of some of the species in the park, so that we might be able to tell if their populations decline, and then see if we can help them.

Click to page 2 below to see the answer and keep reading the article.

How Do You Want Your Readers to Feel?
The 4 C’s

To be successful in your mission-based writing, you must carefully consider how you want your readers to feel. Most of the time, you are aiming to elicit four different responses simultaneously, which I call the four C’s. Miss any one of them, and you will not get the results you want.

How You Want to Make Readers Feel: the 4 C’s

• Concerned about the problem
• Compassionate toward the constituents (including themselves, if you are trying to engage them in services)
• Confident in your ability to address the problem
• Captivated by your story of real or potential impact, so they will remember you

 

A helpful exercise is to take a piece of writing and assess how well it addresses the 4 C’s.

Here is an example from a need statement that has major problems with all 4 C’s:

There is little that can be done to stop the arts from disappearing from schools, and economically disadvantaged families usually cannot afford the time or money to go to museums, performances, or art classes. Many low income people do not appreciate the arts, so it is a challenge to fill our programs. Those who do attend usually come only once. Still, Silver Arts Center continues to offer exhibits, performances, and art classes, hoping that through us, at least some of the urban underprivileged will become involved in the arts.

How Does it Address the 4 C’s?

• Concerned: The passage talks about the arts disappearing without discussing the value of what is dying out. It depicts people with low incomes as not being interested in the arts and does not show how they are missing out on something that would be of value to them. The issue also sounds more depressing than concerning. When concerned, people are motivated to want a solution to a problem; when depressed, we just feel down about it. This passage makes the situation appear so hopeless that the reader just wants to move on to something else and not think about this seemingly unsolvable problem.
• Compassionate: The passage paints the constituents as ignorant, unappreciative, uncultured, and inferior to those working at the arts center. This judgmental attitude blocks compassion for the constituents – or leads readers to feel compassion for their plight in having to deal with such a judgmental, superior nonprofit, rather than feeling compassion for their lack of access to the arts.
• Confident: While the passage shows the nonprofit’s superior attitude, it does not make the reader feel at all confident in the organization’s ability to do their work. On the contrary, the classicism it exhibits shows a huge obstacles to successful engagement of the constituents. It also explicitly states that the arts center has trouble filling their programs and getting repeat attendees, and the reader suspects this may have more to do with the organization’s classicism than with the constituents’ lack of appreciation for the arts.
• Captivated: Far from being captivated by this organization’s story or impact, the reader is left either wanting to forget what was written, or remembering it only because its classicism sparks a sense of righteous indignation against the organization.

 

In contrast, here is an example that describes the same arts center using the four C’s:

Our schools are giving away their pianos and replacing their walls of student watercolors with walls of standardized test scores. The arts are being erased from schools, and families with low incomes have difficulty affording museums, performances, or art classes. People struggling to make a living without access to the arts often do not even have a chance to learn the value creative pursuits could add to their lives. At Silver Arts Center, we believe that creative expression is a vital part of human life and should be available to all, so we offer free exhibits, performances, and art classes in the bustling heart of downtown. We highlight local talent and locally relevant topics, stimulating the art lover – and the artist – innate in each person.

 

How Does it Address the 4 C’s?

• Concerned: The passage discusses the value of the arts and paints a picture of what it means for students and adults with low incomes to live without them. It makes the problem sound solvable through the organization’s work.
• Compassionate: The passage describes the constituents in a way that anyone could relate to; instead of judging them for not appreciating the arts, it shows how their circumstances prevent them from even getting to see what they are missing. It paints the constituents as no different than the writer or the reader, except for their situation. It affirms the artist in every person and makes the reader feel for constituents and want them to have access to the arts.
• Confident: The passage makes the arts center sound like they are part of the community, responsive to the community’s needs, and genuinely appreciative of and connected to the people they serve.
• Captivated: The organization sounds inspiring and warm. The passage makes the reader imagine how the arts center must be filled with struggling people who have found that its classes uplift them and transform their lives through enabling them to discover the joy of creating art.

 

While these examples are extreme, you may find on examination that your writing is strong on two or three of the C’s, but omits or is weak on the other one or two. Make sure it is strong in all four, and your readers will respond.

Mission-Based Writing as Creative Writing

Many people see grant writing and copywriting as necessarily dry and boring, but they’re actually most effective if you use your creative writing skills. The more you can bring your work to life, the more persuasive and memorable your writing will be. And one of the best ways to bring your work to life is to use sensory language that makes readers imagine what it looks, sounds, smells, tastes, and feels like.

Here’s an example of a purely factual description:

Suzie’s House provides beds, meals, and fun activities for youth experiencing homelessness. We have adult mentors facilitate the group activities, and the youth and mentors cook and eat all meals together. We even have a foosball table.

And here’s another description that’s about the same length, but feels completely different:

Suzie’s House finds youth sleeping on hard park benches in the cold, and brings them inside for cozy beds, foosball, and laughter. Youth and adult mentors connect while cooking and eating favorite meals together, such as pizza and spaghetti.

 

Try looking at your writing and thinking of where you can add sensory details that will make your readers imagine the challenges you address, how wonderful it feels to participate in your work, and how much better life can be afterward.

 

How Mission-Based Writing is Like Dating

Think of a time when you were infatuated with someone, and you wanted to get them to like you, connect with them, and see if you could get a relationship going. That’s actually what you’re always trying to do in mission-based writing. Whether your goal is to persuade a foundation to fund your work, a donor or volunteer to contribute, or a potential client to come receive services, what you’re really trying to do is build a relationship, so it can help to apply commonsense dating tips to your writing.

Here are a few common sense tips to follow if you want to get a relationship going with someone new, whether in dating or in mission-based writing.

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Be Concise and Show All
the Positive Impact You Make

You want all of the people who benefit from or assist work – or who might do either one – to understand the full positive impact of all you do. It is crucial to quickly and effectively impart this understanding to your actual and potential clients, constituents, referral sources, staff, volunteers, donors, funders, investors, and promoters. If they all know how great the work is, you will get more and better suited recipients, more and better quality volunteer and staff work, more and larger financial and in-kind contributions, and more and better quality promotion.

Yet all too often nonprofits and mission-based businesses express only the most basic and obvious ways that they make a difference, and don’t paint a vivid picture of the depth and breadth of benefit they provide. Frequently this omission is in the name of conciseness, yet it is possible to concisely describe each level of impact, and it is very worth the space, for it may be the most powerful way to inspire people to come receive or give as much as they can. A concise bullet or numbered list of every level of impact is an excellent piece to use in websites, brochures, donor solicitation letters, social media posts, grant proposals, and more. It is quick and easy to read, and the list format emphasizes that there are many levels of positive impact that people might not immediately see.

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This Tiny Word Can Do Wonders
for Your Work

The way you describe your organization or business defines how people connect to it – or don’t. Your word choice matters, even down to what pronoun you use.

You may be thinking, “But we don’t have a choice; an organization is an abstract noun, so grammatically we have to use it.”

Not so.

An organization is also a group of people. As a member of the group, you can use the pronouns we, our, and us. Or if you are a solopreneur, you can use I and me.

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4 Ways to Make Your Brand Story Compelling

The word “brand” probably makes most of us think of sterile corporate logos, but in my last Flight Log article, I wrote about how a good brand story actually advances your work by adding human warmth to an overly commercialized and anonymous world. In this Flight Log, we’ll look at four traits that can make your brand story so compelling that your audience not only remembers it for years, but wants to connect with and support your business or organization.

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