Occasionally grant opportunities become available to you, a non profit organization leaders, on very short notice. It’s not unheard of to get a call to submit a request by the end of the week. Developing a set of grant attachment files helps you spend your limited time crafting an application rather than collecting attachments. At other times, grant attachment files speed up your grant preparations, reduce last minute panic and allow you to assign preparation of attachments.

The next time you complete a grant take a few minutes to collect and label one file for each of the following:

1.Your 501(c)(3) IRS tax exempt letter
2.A list of your board members with addresses, affiliations and terms, include an effective date
3.Your last audit, unbound and printed on one side
4.Your accountant’s opinion letter
5.Your response to the accountant’s letter
6.An organizational chart with an effective date
7.Your current budget
8.Recent newspaper articles, positive evaluations, press releases or other evidence of your achievements
9.Organization newsletters
10.Co-agency agreements or a list of them and a contact person
11.Recent reference letters or people who will write a letter in a week
12.Action photographs to insert in the narrative
13.Demographic information on the community you serve
14.Your operating statistics like the cost of fundraising, percent of overhead, etc.
15.A copy of your strategic plan and effective date
16.Funding sources from last year
Assign half of a file drawer for attachments. Then make copies, label the original, and after you use the last copies pull the file and create more copies at your leisure. With these files, when a grant opportunity arrives, you will invest your time shaping a unique response to it. These files are found and used in the most successful nonprofit organization to speed up the time it takes to obtain grants and increase the return on their grant writing time.

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For more than 20 more articles to help you with grant writing see this directory.

For six audios to purchase that will help you write grants if you are a newbie or an expert, follow this link. Each offers one hours of training from Karen– and contains the content of her famous grant writing workshops.

For other sources of nonprofit income to augment your grant opportunities, read this article, Can Your Organization Obtain More Income?