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Collaborative efforts can offer more comprehensive responses to community challenges than any one organization alone can deliver. When the muscle and know-how of multi-talented teams focus on a mutual concern, there’s a real opportunity for impact. Laying out a coordinated approach in a collaborative grant proposal is powerful and highly competitive.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has issued the 2020 version of the Compliance Supplement (CS) to the Uniform Guidance codified in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). Like its predecessors, it is a massive 1,554-page tome. Here are some highlights to help you navigate.

A capacity-building grant is a specific type of award meant to strengthen an organization’s systems and thereby increase its effectiveness. The term is a little confusing, so it’s not uncommon for grantseekers to think the purpose of these grants is to increase service capacity and expand programming. While strengthening internal systems can eventually result in expanded service capacity, that’s not the immediate focus here.

Administrators and board members must make extremely difficult and unpopular decisions as they work to sustain the organization through to the other side of the storm. They have to think in terms of triage, bottom-lines, core mission, and doing the least harm.

Identifying the specific social-change outcomes you hope to achieve is challenging, but it’s critical that the outcomes you propose accurately reflect your organization’s values and views along with an understanding of how social change works

This forced hiatus from the office is an anxiety-filled nightmare of handwringing and handwashing. The worries are real, but we can’t get frozen in place, we’ve got to discipline ourselves to be productive and prepare to rebound.

Clear, strategic communication has always been the magic ingredient that promotes strong program implementation, good working relationships, and effective nonprofit management. But when a crisis crashes in and disrupts any notion of business-as-usual, the imperative for communication escalates at the same trajectory as the disruption. Don’t go quiet with panic or let the huge details of change management side-line communications.

The sobering reality is that sometimes the sky really does fall. The challenges of everyday life in a nonprofit have little in common with the profound life-altering crisis of the current pandemic. This one’s going to test us all to our limit. Doing our best, whatever that may be in this new framework, is all we can do. An important part of that is preparing now so we will come out intact on the other side.

Some nonprofits always seem to be in the right place at the right time, standing shoulder to shoulder with other community organizations and reeling in grant awards one after another. What’s the story? Why are these nonprofits the darlings of every get-things-done project of every local school, community group, and municipal agency? When you see a nonprofit partnering intensely and successfully, you’re looking at an organization that values and cultivates community engagement.

When first diving into a high-quality funder research database, you’ll probably feel giddy with relief. With only a few clicks you can find “go” and “no-go” indicators to flush out those grantmakers most likely to support your work. But relief will soon morph into disappointment as one synopsis after another warns that the funder does not accept unsolicited proposals.