Crafting Effective Grant Proposals: Maximizing Funding Opportunities with Care and Confidence

How do you go from a funding opportunity announcement, to an idea, and finally to a successful grant application in a library where resources are limited and competing priorities make projects unattainable? Do you know any library employees who are eager to acquire grant funds to support creative projects that otherwise could not happen without external funds? Are there questions about where and how to get started, and what steps you can take prevent folks from reinventing the wheel? Do you think there are enough interested library employees who want to start a coordinated grantseeking effort?

Building on 17 years of developing workflows and systems for managing all aspects of library grantseeking activities at the University of Arizona and University of Florida, this webinar shares best practices including checklist examples for guidelines and workflows, funding alerts describing funding opportunities for libraries, and examples of submitted proposals. Behind the scenes stories will divulge ways ideas were generated, and how ideas developed through feedback with library staff and partners. Featured proposals highlight a variety of grant-funded activities including collection development, digitization, training, planning and collaborations with diverse partners and for diverse materials.

Outcomes:

• greater understanding of the steps involved to create successful grantseeking efforts in libraries;
• knowledge of how library grant projects originated and how they developed into fundable grant proposals; and
• inspiration for the transformative power that grant funding can have on project teams and library users, and how this brings new energy and enthusiasm to the work of library staff.

Presenter: Bess de Farber has provided grantseeking instruction and collaboration workshops to thousands of library staff, nonprofit and academic professionals, artists, and university students in the past 33 years, and has led efforts to secure millions in grant funding for academic libraries and nonprofits. She is the author of two books on grantseeking, Collaborative Grant-Seeking: A Practical Guide for Librarians, and Creating Fundable Grant Proposals: Profiles of Innovative Partnerships, and co-author of a third, Collaborating with Strangers: Facilitating Workshops in Libraries, Classes, and Nonprofits. Currently, she offers grantseeking trainings, CoLAB workshops for real time collaboration planning, strategic coaching, and editing services through her consulting company, ASK Associates.

CALL Training Partner for this Event: LibraryWorks

**NOTE**: Access information for this learning event will be sent to all registrants by LibraryWorks before the start of the event.