Nonprofit Management All-in-One For Dummies

Chapter 6

Finding Federal Grant Opportunities That Fit Your Needs

IN THIS CHAPTER

Recognizing red flags in NOFAs

Writing to meet the peer reviewers’ expectations

Convincing other agencies to take a stakeholder’s seat in your grant application

Most grant writers start their grant-writing endeavors by writing proposals for foundation and corporate grants. This is definitely the easier route for most grant writers, new or veteran. However, sooner or later you’ll need to start exploring bigger pots of money. These bigger pots are typically found in grant-funding opportunities at the federal level, which means you need to get comfortable reading federal grant application guidelines. This includes reading every word in a Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA), searching for and highlighting the technical requirements for your grant application, and asking the right crew of potential partners to support your grant applications submission.

All federal funding agencies publish guidelines that spell out the type of grant or cooperative agreement application that they expect grant applicants to submit (called the NOFA language). The guidelines and the review points assigned to each section ...