Article prepared by RiverStephens.org and RiverGPT
I recently met with two city officials whose work is to manage housing precarity and homelessness in both the city and the county. And I had plenty of reasons to ask them for funding. Several new programs, in fact. But that wasn’t the meeting I was there to have.
I wanted to understand the problem as they saw it, and to explain what our organization had built in response to a part of it. Maybe a partnership would come from that conversation. Maybe funding would. I didn’t yet know. But I knew something else…
An organization shouldn’t simply ask for funding. It should offer solutions.
And it made me contemplate how nonprofits think about raising money. We look for opportunities, watch the deadlines, study the funder’s priorities, and write proposals that fit. All necessary skills, sure. I’ve done that, and I’ll do it again. Still, I’ve never believed that it’s reasonable to build an organization around a problem and then spend so much energy trying to become the answer to somebody else’s application question. We built our organizations to address a problem that was near and dear to our hearts. Why should we try to fit our square pegs into round holes?
What I have come to understand is that the important work happens before a grant is even announced.
What, you might ask? Well, it’s fairly straightforward.
An organization can become known for understanding a problem that others are struggling to solve. It can develop a response, learn where that response fails, build the relationships needed to carry it out, and know what the work actually costs. When the right conversation comes along, it has something more useful to offer than a list of activities it could undertake if funded.
It has an answer. An answer already in progress.
I sometimes call this becoming a grant magnet, though the phrase may sound a little too easy. There’s no magnetic force that makes checks arrive in the mail. Applications still have to be written. Relationships still have to be built. Public money comes with rules, procurement processes, and political realities that a good reputation can’t wish away. And some necessary work is difficult to fund even when it’s done very well.
The phrase—grant magnet—helps me ask a different question, though: What would we have to build so that investing in this organization became an obvious way for someone to make progress on a problem they already care about?
That question changes the entire order of things.
The grant cycle has a way of reversing what should be a natural progression. A foundation announces an interest in a particular issue. An organization searches its existing work for a match, or invents a new project that seems close enough. The project gets its own budget, its own promises, its own reporting requirements. Then another opportunity appears, with a slightly different vocabulary and another set of promises. A few years later, the organization may have an impressive collection of programs and a much less clear sense of what it’s uniquely there to do.
I don’t think this happens because nonprofit leaders lack conviction. They have payroll to meet. People are depending on the work. If a grant can keep the doors open, it’s hard to be philosophical about whether the language in the proposal sounds exactly like the organization’s own language. I’ve had to make practical decisions under those pressures too.
But each decision leaves a mark. Funders begin to shape what the organization notices, what it measures, and which work it can afford to keep. The community’s problem hasn’t necessarily changed. The organization’s description of it has.
There’s a cost on the funder’s side as well. Funders don’t simply need to be convinced that a problem exists. They need some reason to believe their money can travel through a particular organization and produce a meaningful result. A polished proposal can describe that path. The organization itself has to make the path real.
And the two sides may not even agree on what the problem is. In a Center for Effective Philanthropy survey, 71 percent of foundation leaders said their priorities were very well aligned with community needs. Only 24 percent of nonprofit leaders said most or all of their funders had a deep understanding of those needs. That gap should trouble both sides. A nonprofit that knows its community well has something to contribute to the funder’s judgment, even before it asks for a dollar.
That takes more than a recognizable name. It takes a clear account of the problem, an honest explanation of the organization’s role, evidence that fits the maturity of the work, and relationships strong enough to act where one institution alone cannot. It also takes knowing the full cost, including the people, management, time to learn, and financial room to survive a delay. If we leave those costs out to make a proposal look attractive, we’ve made the work look cheaper than it is. Eventually someone pays the difference, often the staff or the people the organization meant to serve.
This is where I think the idea of a “brand” becomes more serious than logos and messaging. A strong brand is what people understand you can be counted on to do. When a city director, foundation officer, business leader, or neighbor encounters a problem, does your organization come to mind for a good reason? Can they describe your contribution accurately? Have they seen you tell the truth about what you know and what you don’t?
Networking matters for the same reason. I don’t mean collecting contacts until every room contains a possible donor. I mean being present in the conversations where problems are defined and decisions are made. Listening closely enough to discover when your theory of the problem is incomplete. Sharing what you’ve learned, including things a potential partner may need to hear before there’s any money on the table.
Of course, visibility can reward organizations that already have a public voice while smaller groups do the work with little attention. That’s a real concern. The answer cannot be to confuse being well known with being effective. An organization trying to attract investment should be able to show who helped define the problem, whose judgment it trusts, and what would cause it to change course.
Reputation ought to be defined by usefulness, not stand in for it.
There’s another trap here. If a funder begins to see us as indispensable, we may be tempted to promise that we can solve the whole problem. Housing, hunger, education, public health—none of these fit inside one service-providing organization (though a community stability hub can certainly connect people to resources for all of them). Credibility grows when we can name our part and the other parts that need partners, policy, or resources beyond us. A serious investor should find that more reassuring than a grand claim.
This approach may also require the discipline to decline money (hopefully not too often). And I say this knowing how difficult it can be. A grant can expand the work, but it can also subtly rent the organization for a purpose outside its own mission. The question for a board isn’t only, “Can we win this?” It’s, “What will accepting it make us responsible for, and what will we be unable to do because of it?”
I went into that city meeting with a possibility, not a guarantee. I still have to listen, refine what we’ve built, and make a case if an opportunity to invest emerges. The same is true for any organization that wants to attract support. It has to choose a real problem, become capable of contributing to its solution, and let the right people see the work clearly enough to judge it.
By the time you sit down to write the proposal, much of the proposal should already exist.
