Ah … fundraising from foundations. It’s a topic that can trigger trepidation and confusion for many fundraising professionals and executive directors, as well as Board Members. I’ve worked in two types of foundations: a corporate foundation and a community foundation. More importantly, I’ve approached many independent and family foundations for funding, some successfully. I concur that foundations can be hard to understand.

Many nonprofit teams also perceive a power imbalance between their group and the foundation, because foundations have money that nonprofits need.

But remember this: Foundations are in the business of investing in nonprofits that perform work leading to goals and outcomes desired by the leaders of the foundation. If your group can help enable them to come closer to those goals and outcomes, they need you. You are doing something they cannot do themselves. Additionally, your group can help them learn about the complexity of issues and the efficacy of certain approaches related to achieving their goals. If your work furthers their vision of what needs to be done, you may become important to the foundation’s success. Of course, it’s up to you to present your organization’s work powerfully and authentically, in terms that are reflective of their goals as well.

However, many foundations have organizational façades that can be difficult to penetrate. It can be tough to find a real person to speak with, let alone request a grant. This post begins to address that topic.

How do you get started? How do you start building an understanding of your mutual goals with the foundation?

Before you even try to contact anyone, do some research. Each foundation is different from the next, and the size of assets and the number of staff members matters. But “mutual goals” may represent the best starting place. With any particular foundation, are you sure the foundation has goals in common with your organization?

Many development officers have been stymied and discouraged by trying to approach foundations that simply have little or no interest in what their organization wants to get funded. Can you deduce this from the foundation’s published guidelines? Not necessarily, although you definitely need to read them carefully. Look not only at their fields of interest but also their geographic focus and whether they have restrictions on capital or operating funding.

If the foundation publishes a list of their past grants, will reviewing it help you understand what they want to support? Yes, but they may be shifting their interests or emphasis without communicating it through their guidelines. Or there may be strong personal relationships or history involved between the foundation and one or more grantees – not representing a real trend in funding. Past grants may not provide a strong indication of what they will support in the future.

It’s also true that many traditional grant makers have taken the approach of keeping nonprofits and charities at arm’s length, and reducing the number of proposals to which they have to respond. In fact, some foundations accept proposals only “by invitation”, which stops many organizations from approaching them. If you believe the foundation would be interested in what you are doing from reading their grant guidelines and past grants, how do you get around this requirement to be “invited”?

Sometimes it’s worthwhile to invest the time and research to figure out how to get invited to submit a letter of inquiry (it’s possible, even if you have no connections at the beginning), and then a proposal. But if the foundation states they accept proposals by invitation only, it may also mean their leadership is satisfied with what it already funds and doesn’t see the need for more input. And some foundations are simply too small to respond to more inquiries. (It’s not you, it’s them!)

It can take time and creative networking to figure out how to get invited to submit an inquiry or a proposal. But there are also many foundations that don’t require an invitation.

In my next post, I will address effective ways to start conversations with foundation representatives for all types of foundations.

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