Frequently Asked Questions
Best Practices and Relationship Building
Family Foundations are a great source for local funding support. Often they require a far less formal approach and more interested in hearing your “story” than reading a dry grant application.
https://www.thebalancesmb.com/how-to-make-a-grant-proposal-to-a-small-family-foundation-2501950
- Contact Person
- Executive Director
- President
- Chair
- Vice President
- Secretary
- Treasurer
If all the Directors are listed simply as “Director” or “Trustee,” you might consider addressing your correspondence by including all the contact persons listed. Using the Document Generator, simply copy and paste the information provided to the right of the customized document.
If the Funder is a private foundation and all or most of the directors share the same last name, and none of the directors are listed as Executive Director, President or Chair, we recommend that you address your correspondence to the entire family (i.e., Dear Van Norman Family).
We recommend that the letter come from the most senior representative of your organization. If there has been significant communication with a different member, or if there is someone with a personal relationship with the funding organization, include all these individuals in the correspondence.
Your submission will be reviewed by our Research Department, and the Profile Page will be updated upon verification. The participation of more than 1,500 member charities ensures that we are able to provide the greatest degree of accuracy in the information provided. We gratefully receive every submission and thank you for your contribution to our commitment to reliable information.
Application Processes
- The nature, quality and impact of your campaign
- The expertise engaged to carry out the project
- The quality of programs presently offered
- Your level of commitment
- Your capacity to implement the campaign
- Other completed campaigns
- How your campaign or project benefits the community
See also What is the competition for grants?
Tips and Tricks
- Your LOI should be no more than 2-3 pages in length
- Briefly identify what your organization does
- Provide a brief overview of the proposed project
- If possible, document why the project is needed
- Highlight how your project will make a significant impact
- Make sure to show how your project promotes the mission/interests of the foundation
- Clearly state the specific Ask amount that you are requesting from the foundation
- State the overall project budget
- Indicate if other funders are already on board as well as any funds your organization has committed
- Provide contact information for the appropriate staff person at your organization
- Indicate when and how you plan to follow up with the foundation
- Usually you do not send attachments with a letter of inquiry unless specifically requested by the foundation
Have one or two of your colleagues, board members, or a friend of your organization review and edit your document. If you would still like a professional grant writer to review your document, there are many professionals that offer their services at a reasonable price. You can easily source a qualified fund development professional online.
- Based on what I’ve told you so far, do you think an application would be appropriate?
- Your guidelines state that the next deadline is [date]. Is that correct?
- Would you be able to review our proposal for input before final submission?
- Can you advise me on the appropriate amount for a grant request?
- What other foundations should we be talking to about this project?
- How many copies of our proposal would be helpful (if not stated on website)?
Industry Knowledge
A family foundation is a private foundation usually set up by a family or a family-run business. They are funded with the family’s assets and often run by the family members. Many family run businesses set up family foundations as an instrument for charitable giving.
Public Foundations (Family, Special Interest or Corporate Foundations): These organizations are set up solely to make grants. Their assets are most commonly derived from the gifts of an individual or family or from a profit-making business.
Public and Community Foundations: The funds for a Public Foundation are usually derived from many donors that want to designate their funds to a particular area of interest. Community Foundations usually restrict their grants to a particular geographic area.
The CRA allows the formation of three different types of federally registered charitable organizations: Public Foundations, Private Foundations, and Charitable Trusts. A Charitable Trust is most commonly referred to as a “charity” or a “non-profit”. While most foundations are established primarily to provide grants to charitable trusts, most charitable trusts are established to directly provide services to the area identified in their mission statement. The “mission” of these charities and foundations broadly falls into the following categories: Health, Education, Religion, Welfare, Benefits to Community. These sectors are further divided to include causes such as: Art & Culture, Environment, Animal Welfare, Sports, & Civic Organizations. The important point here is that there are foundations and charities to support almost any kind of philanthropic interest. Interested “Turtle Crossings” or “Parrot Rescue”? There is charity for that…and a foundation to fund them!
These Foundations generally do not issue grants but simply redirect funds as they are instructed. Usually, this information will be identified in the Profile Page under the Programs tab. Typically, they are listed as “designated giving” or “donor-advised.” Examples of designated giving Foundations are CanadaHelps, CHIMP, Aqueduct, Abundance, Blue Sea Philanthropy, and most Employee Trusts. Be careful, however, about simply dismissing Foundations that identify as “donor-advised.” Many of these Foundations are interested in establishing relationships with charities that share their values and mission. In addition, these Foundations are often open to multiple year partnerships. However, Grant Advance provides the option of flagging individual Foundations as “donor-advised” and filtering them to exclude them from search results.
The Platform
Our records are updated every month and are based on reports received from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). However, foundations submit filings based on their previous year’s activity. In addition, many foundations file in different months of the year and/or as much as 18 months late. For these reasons, the most current data ever available is usually for a period 12-24 months prior to the current date. However, our monthly updates ensure the most recent information filed is immediately incorporated in our Profile Pages.
Our primary source of data is derived directly from reports that each foundation and charity must submit annually to the CRA. We also supplement our data using information developed by our research department. In addition, our membership community often submits valuable information using the “Update Request” feature on our profile pages.
Grant Advance provides you with the ability to export data to excel files. This data can be exported directly from our Search Engines, Favourite Lists, or from Projects in Grant Secretary. You can export the following fields: Name of Organization, Address, City, Province, Postal Code, Phone, Public Contact, Average Grant, Median Grant, Range Grant, URL, and Notes. Importing this data to other software platforms depends on the capability, permissions, and restrictions of the software programs you are using. Our experience indicates that most management software programs will allow for importing data from excel files.
Absolutely! We don’t believe you should have to reinvent the wheel. Grant Advance Solutions is not a self enclosed system and provides you the convenience to import or export your information as required. You can utilize your own documents in entirety, or build new ones by cutting and pasting your text into the boxes provided for you in our signature Document Generator.
You are also able to customize your document with a wide variety of word processing tools such as font type, size, bullet and number lists, text highlights, importing pictures, graphs, charts, etc.
Even when foundations do not provide a lot of detailed information about their organization Grant Advance profile pages still provides you with valuable information that you can leverage to send an effective Letter of Inquiry. Grant Advance has analyzed several years of donation history for every foundation in our system. This enables you to “intuit” the primary giving interests and mission of each foundation. Using this data, you can determine the geographical preference of the foundation, the typical grant size that they award, whether they issue one-time grants (project funding) or multi-year grants (operating and capital grants). Most importantly, you can determine the types of organizations that they usually fund, allowing you to identify the sectors that matter to them. For example, when you see that more than half of their grants are given to Health organizations you would tailor you request to take this into consideration. If their second largest sector is Education, you might want to include a paragraph in your LOI that highlights an educational component of your project. By properly reading the data we have provided you are now able to ask for an appropriate amount as well as match your request to their interests and mission. You can contact our support team if you require initial assistance on how to effectively interpret the data we have provided.
Strategy
- January: For many Foundations, this is the beginning of their new fiscal year and they have new funds available again for distribution.
- April: Foundations that accept applications throughout the year often have more time available to review applications compared to busy seasons like January and September.
- September/October: Many foundations are coming close to their fiscal year end and must distribute any money remaining in order to meet the CRA requirements of donating 3.5% of their total assets.
Strategic planning is not limited to non-profits and is considered a widespread and popular business practice. The key concept here is that an organization will operate most effectively with an established, current, carefully thought out, written strategic plan.
See also What should I include in my strategic plan?