The Influential Nonprofit Episode 55: Gauri Manglik: New Trends In Grant Applications And Management
Gauri Manglik is the CEO and Cofounder of Instrumentl, a company that helps nonprofit grant seekers with prospecting, tracking, and management all in one place.
In any organization, there has to be a foundation of trust, safety, and respect for one another. How you say things or how you connect with people is important in any environment, especially at work where people spend almost a third of their lives.
Grants are a great funding stream to consider for many nonprofits once they get past a certain threshold of robustness. You have to be able to demonstrate robustness of your programs so that you can be set up for success to receive more funding where funders are actually going to want to fund your program over others. Institutional funders tend to be more risk-averse than individual funders.
Making the right decision in getting grant funding is all about having the right information in your hands and creating a clear and reliable process or system to devote yourself to.
Grants are a strong fund-raising channel to add to your overall portfolio. I don’t think that has changed. One of the things we saw during covid was that institutional funders were the ones that really were able to step up during that time as opposed to individuals.
“When you’re going after an institutional funder, they’re gonna have a higher bar for you to clear ‘because they have a more institutionalized process on their end and they often are giving out larger sums of money. They’re gonna want to make sure they’re giving their funds to an organization that has some sort of demonstrated history of success.”
“Grants are a great funding stream to consider for many nonprofits once they get past a certain threshold of robustness and however, grants as a whole is getting competitive because information silos are getting removed. That increases the need for making sure that you have access to the best data so you could make the best decision on which funders to pursue and make sure that you have a strategic and systematic process for actually applying and incorporating feedback, reapplying building relationships”
“Number one, be very discerning with the funders that you are researching, that are in your pipeline. Make sure that those funders are truly aligned to your mission and to that particular program. The second thing is - have some sort of system… try to not have grants be something that's ad-hoc where you’re applying for things as they come across your desk. Think about your long term goals and work backwards and try to understand how many grants does that mean you’re going to apply for in a given month. Try to understand what needs to be done to make sure that you’re existing funders are truly in a good place to continue to renew.”
Reach out to Gauri Manglik:
Website: https://www.instrumentl.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gaurimanglik/