Researching and Developing a Compelling Statement of Need
We're bringing Dr. Bev Browning, Grant Writing Expert and author of Grant Writing for Dummies, to speak with Kansas City on August 5 on 'What Funders Look for in a Winning Grant Proposal'. Learn more and save your seat.
You know what your organization or agency needs. You can talk about it with great knowledge when you have to do a council or board of directors’ presentation. However, when the time comes to write your application’s Statement of Need narrative, you start by writing what you feel and breathe daily. What’s wrong with this approach? Personal feelings do not belong in any part of a funding request! Knowledge and experience do.
How can you convey the urgency of your need to the funder? By writing the facts integrated with statistics and reference citations. When you know you have a funding need, it’s important to gather all the research supporting or justifying the need first. Your data should not be more than five years old unless you are doing decade-to-decade U.S. Census demographic comparisons (2010 compared to 2020 or more recent Census findings). These are some reliable demographic websites that I use to gather data on my targeted communities and populations:
- State and County QuickFacts (U.S. Census)
- State Departments of Agriculture (County and Community-level Data)
- American Indian and Native Alaskan Populations (U.S. Census)
- American FactFinder (U.S. Census)
- Bureau of Justice Statistics
- Bureau of Labor Statistics
- Bureau of Transportation Statistics
- Energy Information Administration
- FedStats
- Kids Count (also look for state-level data links on this website; your state’s Kids Count website will have data broken down by county)
- National Agricultural Statistics Service
- National Center for Educational Statistics
- State Departments of Education (look for the Accountability Reports)
- National Center for Health Statistics
- Pew Research Center
- United Nations – Statistics Division
- State Departments of Justice and/or State Police or Public Services (for most recent crime statistics)
If your project is in the area of serving the homeless or affordable housing, consider requesting a copy of your city’s or county’s Community Housing Assistance Plan or 10-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness. Both these documents will be chock full of recent citable statistics on your community.
When you write about your community, start with the facts and then provide some snippets of interest to potential funders. These snippets can be as simple as sharing the findings of feedback from a community needs assessment or departmental survey from your colleagues or staff indicating a need for updated technology. Advice from Dr. Bev: Funders want to see the “real” grant applicant and establish a virtual connection to your need, location, and the story (facts with gloom, doom, drama, and trauma entwined) that you share with them.
I hope that you will join me at Nonprofit Connect on August 5th. Learn more and register here.
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