Hi! I’m Kate Martin, the Grants Manager at Dr. Phillips Charities! Welcome to our blog “The Juicy Details”! We’ve started this blog with you in mind – and by you, I mean grant writers, nonprofit organizations seeking grant funding, or anyone who is curious about grant writing.
We’ll talk about good grant writing, share resources, and of course talk about what Dr. Phillips Charities wants to see when we receive Letters of Intent and Grant Proposals. Want to know the Juicy Details? Read below!
Proposals with Polish
We want to establish and maintain an open, honest, meaningful relationship with you and your organization. And help you make a good first (or 100th) impression. Join us for today’s Juicy Details on “proposals with polish.”
Before you call… We have great information about grant guidelines, answers to Frequently Asked Questions, and more on our website: Apply for Grants. Our site is a wonderful resource that we recommend reading before calling with a question – that way we’ll be impressed with your Dr. Phillips Charities grant knowledge when we talk. If you still have questions, Call Me! I want to help!
Grant relationships are kind of like dating… Our Letter of Intent has a Letter of Intent Eligibility Quiz. To honor the Phillips Family’s donor intent, we only fund programs in Orange and Osceola Counties under specific Support Areas. If it prevents you from being able to submit a Letter of Intent to us, it is because we would have to deny your request for eligibility reasons. We value Donor Intent in our grant making, and know it takes a good bit of your time to draft Letters of Intent and in grant writing.
Sometimes we have questions… We recognize that grant writers have put blood, sweat, and possibly tears into their grant proposals. We know it can be frustrating and even painful when we respond with an email asking for clarifications, corrections, or additional questions. We promise, we are not just putting you through the juicer! Instead, we are trying to help you present a full, complete, and compelling grant proposal to our Board of Directors for their ultimate grant making decisions. We know that if we have questions, or do not quite understand how something works, our board will think the same way. Remember the 1996 Classic Jerry Maguire?
“Help me help you!”
(You thought “Show me the Money” didn’t you?! You know you did!)
Embrace the Metrics…. I may have just heard a huge, collective groan go out through the online universe. Dr. Phillips Charities (and I) LOVE metrics. Those little sentences reading X% of program participants will … and a statement about how you will measure whether they have been met, are inordinately helpful for both us and for you. Metrics help show us that you know what you want to do, why you want to do it, and that you know what type of impact you want to make. And it is the easiest way to show your program is successful! (A helpful article: https://www.thebalancesmb.com/grant-proposal-evaluation-section-2501961)
Talk to me…. There is nothing worse than finding out at the end of a grant period that things may not have turned out the way you want. Don’t avoid telling us that you need to change methodologies, there’s been a wrinkle with something, you need to change a line item in the budget, or your theory doesn’t seem to be working out in practice. Sometimes you need to adjust mid-stream to do things differently. We are happy to help with ideas, approving changes, restructuring metrics, etc. Sometimes the best things come out of course corrections, including learning a better way to make an impact or completely unforeseen benefits or even successes. Don’t hide facts or dress them up to make them look better than they are.
Dr. Phillips Charities wants to build relationships based on trust, ingenuity, and support. A little proposal polish, we find, goes a long way.
