What Should I be Doing About Grants?
How do I come up with a good grant plan?
For many of us grants are either a painful memory in which we recall a long weekend and late nights writing or just a good idea that we have never tried. What is a reasonable plan for getting my organization into the grant stream? When I used to play baseball, the coach had a saying. “If you don’t swing, you will never get a hit”. That is one of the basic rules of winning grants, you must participate to win. Are their some basic steps that I should take to move us forward? Can any of that be done without unreasonable amounts of effort?
A strong grant effort includes many of the things that are found in a good baseball swing:
The appropriate stance- in baseball, a batter comes to the plate ready to swing and has the basic gear required and is included because he or she is on the roster. If you are a ministry or a non-profit then you are on the roster, and with a little training, you will have the equipment that you need to play the game. The stance for ministries and non-profits requires that they orient themselves in the right direction by knowing which pitches to swing for, and which grants are appropriate. The opposite is often true, groups swinging backwards because they have not done the basic research to find out where to swing. A good stance allows the batter to develop a rhythm that maximizes body strength. That is what grants should be for your organization, a routine that allows you to flex appropriate muscles over and over. It should feel natural if you are doing it right.
A concentrated effort- every batter knows when it is time to go to the plate. Hitting, just like running and fielding is a concentrated and focused effort. Batters bat when their turn comes. They focus on this and do it with intention and concentration. They don’t bat all the time, but it is a part of the rhythm of the game. If you don’t swing the grant bat, you are only playing one part of the game, and it will be much harder to score.
Overcoming fear- Not so switch sports, but when I used to take tennis lessons, the instructor discovered that I was afraid of being hit. Being the good teacher that he was, he decided to teach me a lesson and began to hit me over and over with served tennis balls. While I wouldn’t recommend the practice, the same is true in baseball and grants. Getting up to swing away means that you have to overcome your fear of failure. Yes you might miss…in fact you are going to miss. But will you continue to swing until you get it right?
Practice- My graduate school grant writing professors had a wise approach to grant writing. He believed, and I experienced the reality that practice does bring about improvement. If you want to get good at writing and winning grants, you have to practice. The more the write, and get feedback from colleagues and grant makers, the stronger you will get in your ability to knock it out of the park.
Home runs are good- having won my own share of grants, which now reach into the tens of millions of dollars, I must admit that hitting home runs with grants is really a lot of fun. There is nothing like that first, second and twentieth grant win to bring a smile to your face and to the face of your team mates. In my short baseball career, hitting home runs required a lot of strikes and singles along the way. And it goes like that. Hit some and miss some, but if you keep at it, you will see that ball fly over left field fence. You and your team will all benefit as well as the people you are working to serve.
<–Learn more about grant writing on a conference call this Thursday afternoon, July 16th at 5:00 p.m. Select schedule to the left to join the call.
Three Reasons Churches are Forming Secondary Non-Profits
Is it ever appropriate to used bullet proof glass instead of the stained variety?
Lots of churches are considering the formation of a second non-profit for community purposes. While the various reasons cover lots of ground, I have found that they usually fall into one of three categores: Risk, Resources or Rapport. Lets explore these reasons to see where your church might fit:
1. Risk- some of the service activity that you provide is enough to make an insurance man’s hair stand on end. Skateboard parks, medical clinics, counseling families, activities with children, school athletics, even rescuing bridge builders during earthquakes. Have you ever asked your insurance provider about this? Since we have a sense of calling to many people and situations that normally make police nervous and would most often have some bullet proof glass involved, we tend to ignore risk. We are there anyway, and we should be, but it doesn’t mean we have to go in without thinking. The big question is what kind of insulation we have between the various kinds of risk that are involved in the services we offer and our assets. Does your church have buildings and vehicles and a budget– that is a set of assets you need to protect. It is also one of the reasons why churches establish secondary “legal persons” for some of their activities. While I am not one of those who sell “risk mitigation” services, I do want to make sure that you can continue to do the ministry that you have been called and resourced to do.
2. Resources- This is an obvious one. We have bigger missions that we do budgets and we are looking for some ways to maximize our ability to raise funds. These resources come in a variety of packages, but many of them do require something beyond the church accounts to be accessed. One common fear of donors and grant makers: that funds going to churches are going to go into their current obligations like building costs, buses and bibles. Not true of your work? Then you might need to consider a secondary corporate structure to convince some of those donors out their. And you know like I do that people have more than one pocket when it comes to giving. When surveyed, many major donors are only planning to give about ten percent to their church, while they have much larger sums to give to “more qualified charities.” The big question here is: “are you willing to create a structure that really serves the demands of donors while staying true to your mission?”
While our mission and the content of our message stays constant, do we need to consider new “wineskins” to help us reach our culture?
3. Rapport- There are some places where the words, “Hello, I am with XYZ Church” are fightin’ terms. I hear lots of stories from ministries who have a real struggle getting access to community events and service opportunities because of an over-sized bias in their communities about church. The real truth is that in many communities, they have never see a real “serving church” and so every church encounter raises red flags, green flags and all kinds of other flags. This varies from place to place and is a real consideration when serving in a long-term way is a commitment. The access that you can create by going through the service channel is often very significant, and allows people to get to know you without conjuring images of stained glass and itchy wool pants (my personal church image from childhood). On top of that, some leaders like principals and others have big job or legal concerns about direct participation with churches.
Explore these issues in greater depth by joining a Non-Profit Briefing with David Mills. Select “schedule” from the tab on the left and join the next available session (june 24th 3:00 p.m.). Click the schedule tab, select “non-profit for churches” and “webinar” and the open time on the 24th.
Second Non-Profit as Missional Platform
A ministry platform is a program, service or endeavor that we put in place to give us entre’ to new relationships within the surrounding culture. An attractional approach to ministry will build programmatic platforms within our ministry– so that people will be attracted to us. The logic is, perhaps some men will like our fishing ministry enough to also try attending service too, or perhaps a relationship will develop that leads to a faith introduction. One program leading to our core programs. An externally focused approach, or a missional approach seeks to put us in the culture, instead of bringing the culture to us.
Ministry platforms have been used for decades in foreign missions, but they are now becoming normal course of business for domestic ministries. Business as mission, is an expression of this in which business people see their work as mission. This is not an institutional effort, it is a personal expression of mission. Community service efforts, and the needs assessment offered by Compassion by Design are more examples of ministry platforms in which we enter the culture through service doorways.
What about ministry platforms that take believers into places domestically where they have never been before? If we believe the researchers who tell us that the American Church cannot reach 65% of the population, then we need to take a hard look at where else we need to go, and a platform approach is just outside the box enough that it might help us reach more. In the process, we might also find that we have more “missionaries” cut from a business cloth than we ever imagined.
Linked here please find an excellent article written by David Befus, past president of Latin American Mission (permission requested). He writes, ” Productive economic activity is a means to enhance and support Christian ministry. This phenomenon of “Kingdom business,” though relatively unknown, has seen successful implementation in the church since the Apostle Paul first discussed his own work habits in his letters to young churches.”
One way to view a business oriented ministry platform is as “cultural scaffolding.” You erect scaffolding to get access to places inaccessible to get something done. And right now, 65% of our culture is inaccessible. A business oriented ministry platform can offer than scaffolding so that we can engage culture where we currently cannot reach.
A Road Map to Community Impact
There are lots of decisions facing us as we look at the future of our ministry and the church. For many leaders, greater effectiveness in engaging the community is becoming a non-negotiable, but there are few models to follow.
If we go along with the current default, we will believe that community engagement means a serious of unrelated service events in which our people have minimal personal contact with people they will never see again. If we are designed to serve and impact our community we have to find ways to invest ourselves that we can sustain, and ways that fit the unique talents, resources and calling of our church. It takes more than events to reach people.
Jesus’ approach to the world around us started with questions. He asked and listened to the words and the heart of the Samaritan women leading to impact that touched a village and then a people. Compassion by Design offers a process that is guided by the use of community needs assessments that have been developed for use by church teams. This is an essential step toward gaining both insight and relationships that will result in open doors for service and insightful engagement.
A big step forward for any church that is serious about community impact is to find a way to listen and gain insight that can lead to ongoing impact and service.
A listening approach like the one built into needs assessment tells community members and leaders a couple of important things, including the fact that you care about their perspective, you are sophisticated enough to start your service with needs assessment, and that you are here to stay.
Our road map into community impact requires that we stop to ask for directions…from the community.
If you are like me, you hate to stop and ask for directions, but in a serious effort to touch a community it is essential. We cannot plot course toward community that fails to ask and then hear from the community itself. If paints us as self-centered and ill informed, and ultimately ensures that we won’t arrive where we intended to go. Needs assessment is the established way to ask those questions, and will serve us well as we discover the path we should take into community impact.
Compassion by Design can support your community engagement in two ways:
1. Our Leadership Manuals– one for church planters, and one for existing and restart churches, now at reduce prices.
2. Expert Coaching and E-Tools- Join David Mills for a 90 minute orientation that will help your needs assessment process to go more smoothly and receive a CD with tools, forms and surveys that you can duplicate for your team. The next orientation will be held June 21 at 3:00 p.m. (click schedule to the left to join).
3. Ongoing Coaching for your needs assessment. Simply make an appointment with one of our seasoned coaches using the schedule button to the left, and get expert advice along with way toward community impact (click schedule on the left).
Join a 90 minute coaching call with David Mills on June 21 at 3:00 p.m. EST to start your journey.