Grants Are Serious Business- Contacts How and Why

First contact - sounds almost like UFO's don't it. There is a lot of contact in this grant writing process, and this first contact is the most important one, you don't get many great clients, so you want to classify the great ones, right away. In clients you are dealing with who, what, when, where, how/why - that is the long and short of it.

Who they are matters. What they are doing matters. When they need to do it matters, (we'll cover more of this in the third in this series "grants and overall knowledge"). Where they are at matters (we'll go more into depth about this in series four "grants are where they are"), the why of a grant brings itself out. So there is no confusion, this portion of the series is totally about, contact in grants, this is the first one, the most important one, the client meeting. Client meetings, will ensue, in all likelihood, they always have questions. Here in this first meeting is when we find out, what this process is going to be.

First Contact - there are questions that must be asked, you need to think through every one of these before the meeting, if you don't, you will reap the reward of missing this forethought. Forethought questions must be centered in two areas, who is your client, personally and professionally? You must know them beforehand, what are they about, what are their resources, what are their demands, what's their status in the business community, do they political "baggage" that must be considered, or, if they have no political baggage, are they going to be bringing some in? You should take the time to establish these facts about them personally.

Professionally you want to establish clear parameters of the "get into" and "get out of", the project proposed. All grants are subjective in some manner; they revolve around a center of determined need. Need when it is straight out, such as poverty prevention, is one type of parameter, but a determined need, such as potential improvements, is another type entirely and must be determined with exactness.

Under stating, a determined need is equally bad with over stating, either side of the issue proper puts you at a disadvantage in approval process. Your task in this first meeting is to find out from your potential client, whether, for openers, they will be a client, and then, what is the basis of the need.

Getting into a project, into a need, depends upon whether it is something that is possible. If the appearance of possible is present, then, and only then, do you want to move to strategic thinking about the moving through process. Do not move from the first point of getting into this, until you have clearly understood that it is possible.

Possible means resources, and once again in this aspect you will need to put to the crucible who, what, when, where, how/why of the need being met. Once you have asked about who is going to be doing what, when they will be doing it, and how or why it will meet the need, and you are satisfied with the responses, now you can move to the point of considering if this is the client.

This process of contact is extensive, you are making commitments, they, the potential client, are making commitments, and you have to determine how that is going to resonate in your life. The most difficult of all decisions is to determine that you don't want to handle a client, and then sticking with it. How you handle that decision and what it can mean to you are very important and we will address those issues in further articles in this series.