Grants fundraising overview and lessons learned

We have had some expected and some unexpected struggles and surprises, and wanted to detail them here so others could learn from them and understand how this fundraising experiment is going. We will also give a short explanation of the current situation regarding Effective Fundraising’s grant writing. These lessons were learned from researching hundreds and contacting many different foundations about grant eligibility and grant focus areas.  

The main outcome is that we have applied for all of the highest value grants we have found, and feel that the grants we'd find with additional research would have much lower chances of success compared to the current ones we have applied for. 


Lessons in looking and applying for grants for AMF

• Lower foundation interest in international causes as compared to local causes.

We expected this could be the situation as many foundations do not cover the area of international causes and there was lots of data on that fact. Sadly, this is also true for most other areas of giving. 

• Foundations care about where your organization is located.

We were surprised by how many foundations cared about not just where the funds would be applied, but also where your offices are located. This made grantwriting for AMF more difficult as the large majority of the foundations are US based. For example the largest foundation database for US foundations contained ~120,000 foundations with ~50 billion dollars of yearly grants, whereas the UK data base contained less than 10,000 with only ~1.3 billion of yearly grants.

• Novelty and innovation

Many foundations cared about novelty and innovation, often wanting to test something unproven or new. We knew this would be a challenge to some extent as private foundations in general have the reputation of being more innovation focused compared to other donation vehicles, but were surprised at how large an effect it had. For example the Gates Foundation has put their focus on “efforts to improve existing vector-control tools and develop new ones that can interrupt transmission in all settings.” Although this is a great goal this is not what AMF focuses on and thus was not eligible for possible grants in this area. We found governmental grants to be less innovation-focused and more in line with what AMF was working on.

• Country specific

Another difficulty with grant writing for AMF was that many of the grants required country-specific targeting. For example, all the bednets going to a specific area in a specific country. Due to the way AMF coordinates its distributions and the large number of countries AMF works with, this made some grants more challenging, or simply impossible to apply for. 

Lessons in looking and applying for grants for The Humane League (THL)

Surprisingly, it was much easier to find grants for THL, though they were for significantly smaller sums ($1,000-$50,000) than the grants available for AMF ($50,000-several million).

• Lower foundation interest in animal causes compared to human causes

We were not surprised by the smaller interest in animal causes when compared to human causes. We had data on the lower interest in animal rights when compared to other larger human causes areas (e.g. first world education or health). There was in total slightly more grants than we expected for animal rights.

• Significantly lower interest in farm animals when compared to pets.

We were also not surprised by the comparatively tiny interested in farm animals when compared to pets and companion animals. From conversations with animal activists this trend also seems very true in other areas of giving and general public interest. In fact, in some countries such as Canada you cannot even be legally registered as a charity if your goal is to spread meat reduction or vegetarianism.


Findings that applied to both

• More grants are available for charities doing a wider range of projects.

It was much easier to find eligible grants for THL than AMF, in part because THL was doing a wider range of activities, and thus appealed to a wider range of grant-makers. For example, grant-makers that cared about animals and education had a program, and grant-makers that cared about animal rights and politics also had a program. 

• Foundations seem very interested in research.
  

When looking for grants for both THL and AMF, we found many grant-makers interested in the causes the organizations stand for, but more specifically in research in that area. The Humane League Labs got a lot of interest and it would have been likely easier to get grants for AMF if there was some malaria research happening under the same organization.

• Foundations are more interested in giving to charities they know personally.
  

Foundations generally are much more likely to give to a charity they know personally or have heard about before. Due to this many foundations were not accepting applications and also tended to fund organizations local to them. This was a challenge as we had minimal foundation contacts compared to a larger charity or more experienced grant writer.

Results

Unfortunately we do not have a good measure of the results of our work yet as we are still waiting for replies from the vast majority of grants we have applied for. This can take between 1 and 12 months depending on the foundation. We plan on publicly posting the end results of the grants in terms of money moved as well as a specific breakdown of the total number of hours put into each grant. (update on this we have received one grant for $10,000)