LAGUNA NIGUEL, CA – The new Tom Cruise thriller, Dead Reckoning Part One, will be in theaters in July 2023. The return of Ethan Hunt reminds us that one of the most important secrets of success for grant writers is to blow away the funder. After funders have read your application, they should be in awe of your charity. This is particularly true when you are writing grants for a new charity that lacks the built-in credibility of older charities.
This raises the question of what techniques can you rely on to help you come up with a creative, remarkable project that would impress even a hard-boiled villain like The Entity?
For us, the sign of truly great grant applications is the feeling that we have had an epiphany.
According to our online dictionary, an epiphany is a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.
Amazingly, we find that an epiphany can occur at any stage of the grant writing project. It can happen immediately when you hear the idea and understand that no one else has seen something so simple or clever as this before. It may be halfway through the project when you realize that new research gives you powerful support for a fresh approach that no one else has anticipated. It may, in fact, occur at the last minute, when you grasp a missing piece that pulls everything else together. Practically speaking, the earlier epiphanies are the most useful.
For us, epiphanies often result from a collision between two entirely separate branches of knowledge. For example, my doctoral dissertation and first published work resulted from the collision of traditional political science theories regarding the origins of the United States welfare system and more up-to-date insight from the child development field which explained the development of the first child welfare programs as a consequence of the prior implementation of child labor laws. Remarkably, this was a cause that was never considered by political scientists in the past. I figured it out by reading outside the field of political science.
The same sort of fruitful epiphanies may occur if the grant project you are working on involves combining the insights that are traditional in the non-profit’s field of interest, with the insights developed by brand-new research in an unrelated field. By interviewing the client, you can often identify a unique and original approach that will win them positive attention by asking how new research is impacting their work.
Another way to generate an early epiphany is to look for ideas that apply new technology to solve existing problems. Accordingly, we are now seeing traditional grant writers who are drawing attention to themselves by advertising how they make use of software development systems like Scrum or Agile. Others are highlighting their use of artificial intelligence (AI). All of this is taking the right approach.
In many ways, showing how your non-profit is leveraging the latest technology is one of the quickest, fastest, and most effective ways to create a project that will “blow away the funder.” For example, you might impress the funder by explaining how the use of a new app is helping those with traumatic brain injury (TBI) navigate their college classes. You might invent a new way to counsel people through Zoom or figure out how to deliver groceries with a drone.
Either approach – combining two different fields, or adding in new technology – will provide the opportunity for an epiphany that will make your non-profit stand out and secure grant resources.
