1) Corporate funders often want to consider requests bundled together in one solicitation per year.
2) Corporate giving budgets are being set further in advance, especially marketing pots of money, which may be earmarked as early as the previous fiscal year.
3) Corporate funders are often only funding in geographic areas where they have local operations, making it difficult to approach out of state corporations.
4) With globalization, more corporate funders are investing monies largely at the national and international levels - rather than supporting smaller locally focused organizations.
5) Corporate funders are often only giving money to organizations in which their employees volunteer, make donations or serve on the board of directors.
6) Corporate funders are very interested in sponsoring special program-based projects that create high-visibility impact, such as a week-long house building blitz or a youth day of activities associated with a major sporting event, etc.
7) Corporate funders are spending more money on "cause marketing", in which their philanthropy is co-branded with a charity or nonprofit. Again, national organizations are better positioned to gain this type of support.
8) Corporate funders are receiving many, many more requests than in previous years due to the increase in the number of non-profit organizations, so competition is fierce.
9) Corporate funders are increasingly using online grant applications so that requests can be transferred into database systems to better manage and respond to the larger number of requests.
10) At the same time, the web-based technology has coincided with corporate funders becoming more rigorous about what they require in grant applications - they now want to fund specific projects with clear objectives, measurable results and proper evaluation.
11) Corporate funders are shying away from event sponsorships as they are seen as not directly supporting at-need individuals. There was a was a local effect in southeast
Michigan
resulting in a lower number of corporate sponsorships over the last two years because of the All Star game and the Superbowl in 2006.
Current articles include topics such as the top ten websites for grant writers, the importance of building relationships in grant seeking, and avoiding mission drift when searching for funding for your organization.
American Community Survey (ACS)
American Housing Survey (AHS)
Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS)
Consumer Expenditure Survey (CES)
Current Population Survey (CPS)
Decennial Census of Population and Housing (Census-2000)
National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS)
National Ctr. for Health Stats Mortality-Underlying Cause-of-Death (MORT)
National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (HANES)
National Health Interview Survey (NHIS)
National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation (FHWAR)
Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP)
Survey of Program Dynamics (SPD)
While the application can be a little hard to operationalize at first, with a little practice and calls to their toll-free help desk, DataFerrett can be helpful in developing compelling need statements for grant proposals. Fed Stats and Fact Finder also provide web-based access to census and other data.
Grant makers are increasingly providing downloadable online Portable Document Format (PDF) forms, both static and dynamic. Even with the interactive forms designed to be filled out digitally, one is often unable to save the document with the inputted content, as with the standard application form for federal domestic assistance, SF-424. A similar problem arises when only hard copies of grant forms are available.
Unfortunately, the Adobe Acrobat software to fill out and save forms is cost prohibitive to many. An alternative is to use other commercial PDF writers; a simple online search will generate many options. The best perhaps is
PDFill Form Filler 4.0. A free trail version is available for testing the program prior to purchase at a very affordable price. Using this tool will allow you to save copies of completed dynamic PDF forms while retaining inputted data, and convert static forms into active documents to be keyed in digitally. You can also input scanned versions of forms from hard copies and then convert them into PDF format for completion. You may even find yourself converting Microsoft Word documents, which are editable, but create formatting challenges once you start altering the form template; changing them into a writable PDF form solves this.
