Common Questions

Should practical information such as leadership team names and positions be included in the Organization/Team Biography section, or would that be a part of the cover letter or elsewhere?

As with a lot of questions, this will depend on the grant you are applying for and their specific instructions. In most cases, however, you would either include this information in the covering letter or (very common) it would be requested in the first couple of pages of the application form. These pages usually take the form of a simple table asking for practical info, e.g. physical address, number of staff, annual turn over, contact person/address etc.

For the sake of keeping this training focused we are not asking you to complete this kind of introductory info form, since usually that would be quite straight forward for teams. In this situation then, since we’re encouraging you to be concise (300 words is not a lot), you should only include names/roles/titles that are central to the proposed project and that will help the reader to make sense of what is to follow. In a real world situation you might have included this info in the aforementioned form and so not need to do so in this kind of section, but it is probably good practice not to assume the reader has read the info sheets at the beginning anyway.

Can you submit multiple grant applications at once?

It is acceptable, and normal expected practice, for organisations to apply for multiple grants concurrently (at the same time). As there can often be a significant delay between the closing date for applications and receiving notice of success/failure for a grant, it would not be reasonable to expect organisations to wait until they have heard whether they were successful before applying for a different grant.

However, it is important to note two things:

1. All funders are different, with their own expectations, focus, interests and requirements, with different forms and questions. Therefore you should not submit the exact same proposal to different funders. However, you can (and should) make use of previous applications/projects, successful and unsuccessful, to build a new proposal that is specific to the funder to which you are applying. That means that while you might be applying concurrently to multiple funders for the same project, the applications should look different because they are looking to connect with the specific funder being approached.

2. It would be unethical, against the terms of the grant and potentially illegal to (a) receive money from two funders for the same activities, or (b) to use money from a funder for different activities than those planned (in the case that you have already received funding for your application). The latter might be possible following discussion with the funder, but only with their explicit agreement.

Can you include salaries for project staff in a grant proposal?

Grant proposals can and should include the direct costs for the portion of the salaries of project staff to cover the time they are actually working on the project. Those would be calculated for the amount of time that these staff give to this project work in proportion to their total salary.

e.g. If project implementing staff work 50% of their time on this specific project for the full length of the project (ie. 2 years), and the remainder of their time on other duties not directly related to this project itself, then the costs for the staff salaries would be .50 of their salary for the two years that they are implementing the project.

One problem with staff salaries as being covered by grants is that grants are time-bound, so ongoing salaries are not assured. Grants are by nature short-term. So you cannot keep an organization alive by grants alone. A healthy organization needs some other streams of revenue, particularly some revenue that is undesignated and unrestricted.

Grant revenue is designated and restricted. It can only be used to deliver the outcomes for the approved project grant, so the salaries for staff must be clearly linked with their roles in making the project succeed. It is usually clear when you are including the direct costs for salaries where staff deliver the skills and expertise needed to accomplish the project (eg. Trainers, project managers, project evaluators, etc.). It becomes more challenging to calculate the general administrative support staff time for workers that a healthy organization must retain to keep their organization functioning (eg. Organizational leaders, those handling the HR and financial administrative roles, etc.).

One cannot apply for a grant that is focused on all the administrative costs for ongoing salaries for all the workers in an organization. Often grant-makers expect that the administrative support costs for salaried staff doing roles like these would be included in an indirect cost rate, often a percentage, like 10% of the total project costs.

Sometimes the administrative time and support for this specific project includes roles and salary portions are actually much higher than would be covered by the expected or acceptable indirect cost percentage. And sometimes the grant-giving organization states that they will not include any overall amount/percentage for indirect costs and require all labor/salary costs to be justified and included as direct costs. Where that is the case, the applicant should break these administrative support salary costs down in direct costs according to the proportion of the salaried staff member’s time expected to be dedicated exclusively to this project (ie. 5% of the organizational leader’s time, 10% of the accountant’s time, etc.).

Can you request grant funding to cover only some costs/parts of a project?

Many funders are happy to fund one aspect or portion of the costs of a project. However, it is a good idea to check the criteria and materials related to the grant opportunity to see if the funder has any particular guidelines or policies that apply to this situation. In your proposal, make it clear which parts of the project (or which costs) you are requesting funding for and the total amount of funding you are requesting. You should also make clear how the other project costs will be funded.

The budget associated with your proposal should include ALL of the project costs, but make clear which line items you are asking them to fund and how the others will be funded. Here is an example of a budget for a project with multiple donors. In this example, some line item costs are split 50/50 between the donors, while others are covered entirely by one donor or the other. You could add as many columns as necessary to indicate other sources of funding that will be used to fund the project and to which costs they will contribute.