Nonprofit Performance 360 Magazine Vol 5 No 1

Grants Corner

CYNTHIA M. ADAMS

Using Social Media to Build a Grants Committee

Social media mastery can raise a nonprofit organization’s social profile, public awareness, and image, but it does not necessarily raise money. Any organization, even in today’s internet-savvy world, needs a strong grant seeking committee. Here are some suggestions for starting a committee or ensuring your plan is securely in place. Take a page from crowd sourcing to help you establish a solid grants committee to help identify, write, submit, and manage grant requests. It is a mistake to think that the committee itself needs to be small, or that the individuals who volunteer for this committee need to be deeply involved in your organization.You want to identify people who are looking for an opportunity to enhance their skills, be it in research, writing, editing, or even layout and design. It can be a real boon to use social media, such as LinkedIn, to help recruit committee members. There are three layers to the recruitment process. 1. Identify the specific skills needed to submit strong grant requests. 2. Find the right individuals with these particular skill sets. 3. Define each committee member’s responsibilities. Here are the roles that I find most helpful for grant committee members.

The Researcher is the person who will build your case for support, your statement of need, so this person must be somewhat analytical. They will need to make connections between facts and figures. Their main job is to demonstrate the need for the funder to support your request. The Writer takes all of the information you feed them, from the data gathered by the Researcher, to a draft program description you may have given them, and turns it into a compelling request for support. I like to have two or three people in this position so that I am not asking any one person for too much of their time. You want only one voice reflected in any grant request, though, so never combine writers on a job. The Data Researcher and Analyst is someone really good at using data to develop charts and graphs or any visual that will strengthen the statement of need or overall request.This person often works directly with the Researcher and may even be the same person. The Copy Editor proofreads the entire proposal before it is submitted to make sure it is grammatically clean, accurate, and readable. The Accountant helps develop the budget. They should be able to read through the narrative of the proposed project and get a pretty good idea of what budget items need

to be included in the proposal. This person can be particularly helpful, as they can help with the budget narrative as well as develop the budget. The Graphic Designer takes the draft proposal and makes it look great. For example, they may use the budget to create a pie chart reflecting expenditures, which will be included at the top of the budget page so that individuals who are visual learners can understand the budget at a glance. TheEvaluator helps you design the evaluation component of the proposed project.They will also be able to help you identify measurable outcomes and the measurement tools to determine those outcomes. The Attachments Coordinator is someone highly organized who will review all of the grant guidelines and pull together all of the documents you will attach to the grant request. Their job also includes assembling the final package for submission. After identifying the different positions that you need to fill (you may not want or need all of those I just listed), you need to write a short job description for each committee position. For example, the Researcher needs to have a good working knowledge of how to do targeted research using the Internet. This person needs to be able to uncover and pull the information needed to build a strong

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