Welcome to Stress-Free Strategic Grant Readiness, Planning & Management. This unique course is based on a system I used for my employers and clients since 1989, and continues to be improved. It is unique in that it gives you proprietary tools for managing your readiness:

• to win grants
• to receive grant awards
• to report outcomes
• to track every aspect of the proposal preparation and submission process
• to organize and keep current every piece of data that you might need to use in any proposal
• to plan funding for several years in advance
• to choose the right funder, for the right program, at the right time, and in the right sequence

If you've ever applied for Funder A's grant for your healthcare program costs only to find that Funder A was the only one who would fund your construction or administration costs, while Funder B would gladly have funded your healthcare program costs, you can appreciate how important it is to plan carefully, especially when future funding will be affected.

If you've ever wished you had a way to choose which funder, for which program, in which order and at what time, this is the course for you.

THREE COURSES IN ONE

As you know, more and more funders are requiring their non-profit applicants be be “GRANT READY." When you and your beneficiaries are depending on these funders to keep your programs running, becoming GRANT READY is one of the most important actions you can take. This course includes the full Win More Grants by Becoming Grant Ready course, including the full text and checklist download.

The Strategic Planning section of this course is unique and available only as part of THIS video course. As a grant writer, nonprofit, or consultant, you will find this course gives you a complete solution for developing a system of grants management and strategic planning. It includes a series of data management and tracking forms, three funder-selector calculators, and a system to tie them all together into stress-free, grant planning and management system. You'll be so organized you, and your teammates, will actually be able to take your lunch breaks.

The full course, CQI/TQM for the Rest of Us is also included along with the downloadable textbook and the PowerPoint slide set to use in training your staff or clients. Along with the quality improvement tools you need to develop specific, measurable criteria and to evaluate the progress of your programs and projects, you'll get a detailed presentation of why CQI is so valuable, how it can improve your entire nonprofit operations, and how to get people to cooperate with any changes you want to implement.

GRANT MAKERS, you'll find the tools and systems presented in this course useful for evaluating the readiness of your applicants to make the best use of your funds in achieving your goals.

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Stress-Free Strategic Grant Planning and Readiness will provide you a truly stress-free planning and management system, including:

• the forms and a database, to manage your entire grant funding system
• funding opportunity calculators that you will use to weigh the fit between your programs' goals and each funder's goals and to help you choose the right funder, for the right program, at the right time, and in the right sequence. This is especially valuable for organizations that have a large number of grant applications and multiple projects going on at any given time.
• included is my 1-hour "Win More Grants by Becoming Grant Ready" course with its detailed checklist, that you can use, as is or modify, to ensure and maintain your GRANT READY status.
• included is my 2-hour quality improvement course, "CQI/TQM for the Rest of Us" along with the forms and the presentation slides that you can use to train your staff or clients in developing useful measurable criteria for each of your programs, or for your entire organization, as well. You'll see how we used it to get every employee to participate, and in every aspect of running our hospital district.

What you'll learn in this program is how to develop a strategy for funding all of your projects and programs for the foreseeable future, say five or ten years ahead:

• How to MAKE YOUR non-profit Grant-Ready - A vitally important aspect of NPO management. Grant Readiness is often overlooked, causing NPOs to lose grant funding
• How to IMPLEMENT this proven proposal-writing management process
• WHO BELONGS ON YOUR proposal-writing and management teams
• What to INCLUDE IN YOUR proposal writing and management policies and procedures
• How to manage each phase of YOUR proposal-management process
• How to ESTABLISH CRITERIA for choosing your funding sources
• How to AVOID SUBMITTING MULTIPLE APPLICATIONS for the same RFP
• How to DECIDE WHICH RFP to apply for each program or project
• How to DETERMINE WHEN to apply for each grant you have identified
• How the tools in the Strategic Planning Toolkit (included) are used to create a system that flows SMOOTHLY AND STRESS-FREE.

And to wrap all of this together, the grant management system provides a sample written procedure for a smooth-flowing process from the moment you begin to choose a funder to the moment you submit the proposal to the funder. I show you, also, how to select members for your grant management team, and for your strategic grant planning team.

The system ensures that your grant applications will be error free, thoroughly reviewed, checked for accuracy and completeness and submitted error free and with essentially no stress or last minute crises (conditions most likely to cause errors.)

I've successfully implemented this system in small and large organizations. It's flexible enough to accommodate the many unique aspects of different nonprofits' management practices.

It starts with a review of our robust "GRANT READY" checklist. This review will take you section by section through the list of preparations that will set you up to spend you efforts and time on processing your applications and not on constantly checking to be sure you have the minutia in order.

Once you know how to make your nonprofit "GRANT READY" you'll learn how to use the strategic planning and management tools. These tools provide storage for your most current data, to grab and insert in your proposals and budgets. They also provide the tracking records needed to keep your proposal moving through the writing, review and editing stages. In addition you'll have three different methods of evaluating your programs against funders and RFAs to identify the best fits.

At any point you can jump into the CQI/TQM for the Rest of Us course and learn the secrets of developing effective "specific and measurable criteria" by which to measure your programs' effectiveness. Or maybe you just want to do an audit with measured outcomes, assess needs, or develop improvement plans for your programs, to find out exactly how well your program is being managed.

And finally, I'll show you how to put them all together in a streamlined system that you'll love for its utter simplicity.

What isn't covered is that it won't teach you how to write a grant proposal.

Funding, as you know, is not just the result of submitting a qualifying proposal, but of developing relationships and credibility. When your organization is able to show a funder that you've covered all the essentials and are operating at the highest standards, in other words, that you are Grant Ready, you improve your credibility in the eyes of funders. With this system, you can organize your nonprofit in ways that will make your competition wonder what you've got that they don't have.

Not a bad spot to be in.