You’ve been writing grant applications now for some time, and your success rate is picking up. You recently had a rejection letter from a foundation that reviewed your after school program and said they were unclear how you were going to measure the success of the project. They wanted to know how you will know your students are improving academically from your program (assuming that improvement of academic achievement was what you were promising)?

Every grant writer suffers rejection from time to time. It’s a natural part of the process and you’ll always learn something from the rejection. Grantors are becoming very sophisticated in their review process, there are so many competing applications and they must select only the very best. I don’t know this for sure, but I will guess that measuring success is the biggest sticking point for otherwise great applications. It’s not always clear how you’re going to measure your progress. For instance, if your grant application is to raise funds for a preschool playground, not only how will you measure your success (completion of the construction?) but what are you measuring? If you’ve promised that your playground will be a way for STEM subjects to be emphasized in your school, how will you be sure it does that? And why is this a good thing?

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In previous blogs, I familiarized you with the School Funding Center Grants Database – to provide you with a sense of the huge number of sources they identify for school and community grants. I sent you on some field trips through the web and even in your car, drive around your community to find the branch offices that are there for big companies. They are filled with helper-bees and people who want to give back to their communities. Tap their enthusiasm, it’s still a tough economy, but not a totally dry well by any means, and it’s getting better all the time.

I also gave you some tips on turning your grant writing experiences into a try-out for becoming a school administrator if that’s what you want to do. It’s a great place to start.

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