Grant Writing: Turning a "No" into a "YES" with Your Request for Funding Support

Here's a vlog I did today! Here's the entire transcription on this page with some additional resources to help you. 

• You Make An Embarrassing Mistake
• The Things You Need To Know Once Rejected
• The Process Of Getting Funded
• Use The Experience To Your Benefit

Hello, my friend. Rodney Walker here! Grant Central USA. Thank you for joining me. Got some wonderful information to share with you. Just for a few minutes to help you along on your grant writing journey. 

You Make An Embarrassing Mistake

This episode of Get Funded with Rodney, is designed to help you if you've already been writing grants to do a more effective job, especially if you've done like I've done before, which is uhh, bam! Aww, flat on your face! Yes, I've been there. It's never a good feeling when you write a grant proposal the first time and then you fall flat on your face. 

It doesn't feel good. I had that experience. In fact, not sure if you've heard my story, but when I first started doing grant writing, I didn't know what I was doing at all. I was working for a nonprofit organization. We had a contract, a grant writer.

This grant writer would write the proposal. She would come to myself and the other directors and she had a little notebook, takes notes, take out words, and then she would write down some things on some paper, put into a proposal form. 

She would go and submit it. And before you know it, two or three months later, we would get it funded. And I was blown away with that. I was like, wow, she just took my words and made some money out of it. And I don't forget, I asked her will you show me how to do this. And she was like, I'm not going to give you my secret sauce. I was too young and too naive to realize this lady right here was not giving up any information. 

So I dove into the process and that's where I fell flat on my face. I at least try right... OK? I fell flat on my face and did not get funded. And so the next time I had to do some things differently. So today I'm going to be sharing with you what you do when you fall flat on your face.

When you experience that rejection, what do you do? I'll be sharing some information with you about that. So I want you to grab a pen real quickly. And while you're grabbing a pen, do me a favor, grab a pen. If you are here, just let me know that you here say, hey, right now I'm here. 

The Things You Need To Know Once Rejected

Just I know and I see a few of you here right now. Just leave a little comment right now. Hey. Hi. Let me know where you're from. All that good stuff. And I'm going to do my best to try to answer some of your questions in the process of talking to you today and share with you about five things you should do once you experience that rejection. OK, so with that being said, let's dive on in.

The first thing that I want to encourage you to do, and we're going to call this roll call this our revamped plan, OK? This is our revamped plan because what we've got to do first when you have a rejection is not take it personal, all right? Not take it personally. I the first time... The first time when you get that letter, rejection is almost like a door "bam" being shut in your face.  

That's what I feel, because that's been like about a month and a half working on this proposal put all of my blood, sweat tears into making this proposal and then you turn around and send me a Dear John letter here rejected. That's what I got a dear John letter. Dear Rodney, you are not getting funded.

OK, so when that happens, you've got to revamp. So don't take it personal first and then just choose that this is going to be a revamp plan. So I'm going to give you five things for your revamp plan. The very first thing that I want you to do with your revamped plan is to revisit the proposal. 

OK, I want you to go and take the proposal that you submitted and revisit it. Now, you may need to get two or three other people to review the proposal and to see what questions that they have when they look at that proposal.

Evidently, something went through the process where they chose not to fund it. Now, let me say this because this is really important. It's important that you know, that just because your proposal did not get funded did not mean that it was a bad proposal. In fact, it didn't mean that it wasn't something that could possibly get funded. 

They just chose not to fund your proposal at this time. OK, so we want to revisit the proposal first to see are there some things that we could have improved on? And the name of the game is improvement. If you keep on improving, guess what? You could eventually get funded. You keep on making the adjustments, keep on making things better, then you will eventually get funded.

So the second thing is after you revisit that proposal and start doctoring and tickling in those areas that need to be improved, the next thing I want to encourage you to do, I want to encourage you to revisit the funder. 

Yes. The one that gave you the rejection. I want you to go back to them, talk to them now with my story. It was really interesting because I got a letter rejection at the end of that letter rejection was a little P.S., P.S., if you like to come in to discuss the problem areas with your proposal, I will be happy to talk to you.

So that's what the funder told me. It was a senior program officer for this foundation, and I took her up on that offer. And it was one of the best things that I could have done. She set me down, gave me some sound advice, and was very appreciative of that. And eventually, I did another proposal. 

Now, I did not try to go in and convince her to let me be resubmitted to her. I just took the advice and went and later on submitted another proposal to some other places. So when you have that meeting, if the funder is open to you getting a chance to come back, revisit with them and to discuss your proposal, don't try to convince them, say, well, I just fix this right here.

The Process Of Getting Funded

I'm going to fix this. OK, here's a proposal. No, we don't want to do that. We want to do is thank them for taking the time to share information. In fact, I'm going to encourage you to send that person a thank you card. 

You may want to call them, see if you can have that meeting and if it would be open to it, or send them an email, but contact them if they provide you an opportunity, then take advantage of it.

Next thing that I would encourage you to do in this process of getting funded because all this is about getting funded. I want you to revisit your process all the times when you're applying for grants the first time or the first few times you may have a process that may be dated.

And I can't tell you at the training, literally thousands of people in grant writing, a number of people who've been doing it for a number of years had dated processes. I call it doing grant writing the old way. And the last thing that you want to do is do grant writing the old way. 

So you want to look at the process. What did you do first? What was the second thing that you did? What was the third thing? What was a fourth, fifth, sixth look at the processes and see if there was some gaps in the process.

Now you want to make sure that you get some new up to date online grant writing courses in the twenty-first-century grant writing in the Google age techniques that allow you to be competitive. And that's why I encourage you to get training, to go through some type of training that will quickly get you up to par where you need to be so that you can have better systems to help you get funding. 

That's exactly what I did at I fell flat on my face. Bam! Next, I said, you know, there's a smarter way to do this. And that's where I started getting training left and right, reading books, going to training. I went to more than one training. And one thing that you might want to consider, you may want to consider taking a look at our get funded inner circle.

It's a great place to help you to learn all that you need to know to get the right systems and processes in place. And if you're going to get funded, inner circle dotcom are going to Grant Center USA that gets funded, inner circle dot com. You can learn more about that and the processes that we have to help you succeed.

Now, let's go on to the third thing that you should do. The third thing that I'm going to encourage you to do is to revisit your purpose. What was the purpose of why you submitted that grant in the first place? Do you remember? 

Use The Experience To Your Benefit

Most likely it was something that motivated you to at least write it, whether you were writing it for your job or whether you were writing it for a program that you were doing. When I had to take a step back and when I revisit why I wrote the proposal that I wrote the first time, it was for twenty-five thousand dollars for a youth character development program. And I revisited it because the purpose behind it was to do some good to help some people. And that's one of the things I love about those who are seeking to learn grant writing. 

Oftentimes these are people who are do-gooders, people who want to do more good, bring more good into the world, and that's you. That's why I'm so excited to share this information with you. And thank you for doing such a good job of wanting to do more good. But when you revisit the purpose you revisit and you realize that what you're doing is very important. 

So even though you met with rejection the first time. Revisiting the purpose helps to give you greater motivation to pick up dust yourself off and give it another shot. OK, give it another shot, dust yourself off and give yourself another shot and go forward again which brings us to the fifth thing, my friend, that I'm going to encourage you to do once you experience a letter of rejection. 

Revisit it at the revisit that proposal at the revisited the funder after you revisited your process to make sure that they won't par. After you revisited your purpose, then I'm going to encourage you, my friend, to resubmit another proposal to a different funder.

Now, maybe the funder that you came to the first time will allow you to resubmit it to them. Oftentimes they'll have to wait for a period of time, maybe a year. But if they allow you to resubmit it, you can submit it to them again, but also resubmit it to other funders, other potential funders. 

That may be even a better fit that may be willing to give you a shot. OK, now one thing that's going to be really important for you to do, and I don't want you to sleep on this one. I really want you to pay some close attention to what I'm about to say. I want you to nurture a relationship with the funder.

Now, there are a number of things that time won't permit me to share with you right now on how to go about doing that effectively because that requires a system that requires you being more than just a simple grant writer. Just writing some things down that require you getting some strategy. And in our Get Funded Inner Circle, we have a system that helps you to learn what it means to do more of a campaign. 

Did you and as you said, more of a grant development campaign where you're doing not just one thing, but a number of different things at the same time to help give you Highton and better results.

And that my friend begins to be a game changer. That's a best practice that I hope that you will grab ahold of. And if you grab a hold of it, I'm sure that will begin to turn some things around. If this is making sense and if this is help you in any way, do me a favor to two things. 

One asset, you hit that like button. And then secondly, I'm going to ask that if you haven't already subscribed, what are you waiting for when you go ahead, hit subscribe, and then make sure that you hit the little bell because I'm going to live off, OK?

And that bell will let you know that, hey, Rodney is just loading some additional content to help me get funded to help put some dollar bills in my organization, pocketbooks. So that'll keep you in the know. So thank you very much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

And keep me posted on how things are going for you. We've got some dynamic information coming down the pipeline. One thing that I want to tell you about that's coming down the pipeline really, really soon is we have some information that's going to help you to be able to make sure that you and your organization is Grant ready?

Yes. Grant ready so that you get everything up to speed so that you're ready and positioned to get the grants that you need. If you want more information about that my friend, go over, visit me at Grant Central USA dot com and remember, you can reach me there, contact me there. We have a contact page.

Let us know what's going on and we'll be happy to help you become more successful in getting funded. Remember, and all you're doing is be brave, be bold, be brilliant, and take charge.

Rodney Walker is today’s leading expert in Grant Development Systems™ and President of Grant Central USA - Grant Writers Association. Learn more about his online grant writing courses today.