Grant Writing FAQs
1. How can we guarantee that your school will receive a grant?
Simple, we work on a contingency basis, meaning you only pay us if your school is awarded the grant. We will continue to complete grant applications for your school until you receive a grant. If you like, we will continue to submit grant applications until your school has received several grants.
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2. How can we afford to make this offer?
Simple, we only work with seasoned grant writing professionals. Our requirements are that they have completed a significant number of grant applications and that they have at least a 50% success rate.
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3. Will we submit a grant application if we do not believe your school has a better than 50/50 chance of being awarded the grant?
No, as stated above our grant writers have a better than 50% success rate for grant applications they submit. So, if after reviewing the funding source requirements and comparing it to your school and your proposal, if we are not confident that you have a better than 50/50 chance of being awarded the grant we will not take the time to complete the grant application. We are not interested in wasting your time or ours. We will however continue to search for a grant that we believe your school has a better than 50% chance of receiving.
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4. Is there an upfront cost for our guaranteed grant writing services?
No. We get paid when you receive the grant funds.
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5. Can the contingency fee be paid out of the grant funds?
No, it must come from another budget source. It is worth noting that most grants allow you to include an administration fee of up to 10% to cover administrative expenses related to your grant. This may provide you with some flexibility when you examine all of your budgets and expenses.
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6. If you do not have the funds to cover the contingency fee how can you raise them?
Below are six ways that you can mix and match in order to raise the funds necessary to cover the contingency fee.
Double check your budgets—if you were to hire a full-time grant writer the funds would have to come from another budget. So check all of your budget sources, in particular government funds, for available funds.
Spread your payments over multiple years’ budgets—it often takes six months to a year in order to receive grant funds. So take some of the funds from this year’s budget and some from next year’s budget. Note, if the grant is paid out over multiple years then your payments are automatically due in different years.
Vendor participation—If you are willing to designate a percentage of the grant funds to purchasing products and/or services from a vendor they are often willing to help cover the contingency fee. All you have to do is ask.
Corporate & Community Group Donations —Corporations, community groups, and parents for that matter, like to see their dollars multiplied. By giving your school a small donation relative to the amount of the grant they are able to advertise that they were instrumental in helping your school raise a substantially larger amount than they actually contributed.
Fundraisers —see our list of fundraisers for a list of fundraisers that you may find surprisingly easy.
Financing/Leasing —We can help you obtain financing allowing you to spread the contingency fee over multiple budget years.
Example: For simplicity let’s say your school receives a grant for $100,000 to be paid out all in one year. The contingency fee is 15%.
- You check your existing funds and find that you have 5% of the funds need available this fiscal year and 5% next fiscal year.
- You contact your vendor(s) and they are willing to contribute 5%.
- You request corporate & community group donations and receive 5%.
- You hold a fundraiser and raise 5%. /
You have now raised 25% without having to get a loan. You only needed 15%. So what do you do? You begin looking for another grant to apply for because you are well on your way to covering the second contingency fee.
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7. You have people on your staff who can prepare the grant applications. Why should you utilize our services?
In these tough economic times we recommend that you apply for as many grants as possible. If we do a grants search for you and determine that there are ten grants that fit your schools criteria well we recommend that you apply for all ten of them. If you have people who are experienced grant writers, but only have time to fill out three applications, then we recommend you have them complete the first three grant applications and utilize our services to complete the remaining seven.
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8. If you decide to utilize our grant writing services what are the next steps?
- First, we recommend that you start by downloading and reviewing the FREE eBook Write Successful Grants for Your School: A Step-by-Step Guide if you are not already familiar with the grant writing process.
- Second, we recommend you search through are FREE Grants Database to familiarize yourself with the types of grants that are available for your school.
- Third, download and complete our grant writing application.
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9. If you decide to utilize our grant writing services what is required of you?
In order to assist you in achieving your goal of receiving a grant for your school we need the following:
- A primary contact person at your school to work with. It is helpful if there are three or four people on a grant writing committee, but one person must be the designated primary contact.
- The primary person must have access or be able to gain access to school and district data.
- Your reason for applying for the grant must be clearly spelled out. Note, it is very helpful if there is an identified achievement gap at your school that directly relates to your goal in applying for a grant.
- That you have the expectation that we are going to have to apply for at least two or three grants in order to receive the funds you need. There are two reasons for this. First, grant writing is a numbers game. We have a better than 50% success rate, but we still do not get every grant we apply for. So we need to apply for multiple grants to ensure you get at least one. Second, is often times multiple grants are needed in order to get the total amount of funds you need. >
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