Research: it’s what every great grant proposal depends upon, but many grant writers feel like they could use some help with. Incorporating well-done research in your grant is an important step in persuading the grantmaker to fund your work. 

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Use widely-accepted theory to justify the design of your program
• Find theory that supports your work & integrate it in your proposal
• Use statistics to support the need for your work
• Determine the credibility of your sources

Use widely accepted theory to justify the design of your program

In the context of nonprofit work and grant writing, theory means a set of principles that guides a certain practice or activity. For example, if your nonprofit is setting up a community health education program, you would look to the field of education theory to support your program design. Education theory might tell you the best strategies for teaching health concepts to a community of learners of all ages.

I recommend exploring theory throughout the program design process. It will be easier to use theory to inform your program design than trying to find a theory that justifies the work you are already doing.

Find theory that supports your work & integrate it in your proposal

Between theory and statistics, theory is the harder type of research to find and integrate in grants. It can be hard to know where to even begin looking.

Here are some strategies that will help you in your search:

1. Use strategic search methods to find information you need

Let’s say you’re planning (like in the example I gave above) a program that provides health education for a community. You could use Boolean search terms to put parameters on your search results. This works in academic databases and normal search engines!

Boolean searching is using combinations of AND, OR, and NOT between your search terms to yield certain results. So, for my community health education program, I might search COMMUNITY and HEALTH and EDUCATION not EXERCISE if the program teaches health but is not focused on exercise.

Keep a list of the combinations that you’ve tried. After you do a few of them, it can be easy for you to forget what exactly you’ve searched already, and you want to be efficient and not duplicate your searches.

2. To access most academic databases, you’ll either need to pay a subscription fee, be affiliated with a university, or go to your local library.

Most libraries have research librarians who can help you use databases for free at the library.

3. Keep up-to-date with new books and articles that are relevant to your work

I suggest spending about an hour every week learning and reading things that deal with your field. You can even subscribe to newsletters and follow thought leaders on social media to learn more.

4. Pay attention to local news events.

These can have a big impact on your community, and therefore on your work. For example, if your program trains out-of-work farmers for careers in the technology field, then the news that a big corporation bought up a bunch of small local farms will be important to include in your statement of need.

After finding theory and research that supports your work, you’ll need to integrate it into your grant proposal. Unlike research papers, most grants will not require you to include a formal works cited page. 

But this does not mean that you don’t have to cite your sources. You can use parenthetical citations and tag phrases to let the reader know where you got your information.

It’s also important to make the connection between the theory and your work really really clear to the reader. Don’t leave them wondering about the relevance of a piece of research. 

For example, if you find theory that says that educational outcomes are best when discussion and action-based learning are used, you could write this: “Based on Dr. Brown’s educational theory research at the Harvard School of Education, we’ve developed a program that includes both action-based and discussion learning.” Don’t just drop in the theory; you have to make it clear how it relates to your work.

Use statistics to support the need for your work

In addition to using theory to support your program design, you can use statistics in your statement of need. Of course, you can’t perfectly capture a community through numbers.

It’s also important to engage with the community and include quotes from interviews in grants. But numbers are a good way of demonstrating statistically significant phenomena in a community.

Here are some stats you could include in a statement of need: per capita income, average household income, educational attainment, race or ethnicity, population, age, veteran status, housing status, and more.

One of the best sources for demographic statistics is the U.S. Census Bureau.

When you search for information on this site, be as specific in your geographic scope as possible.

For example, if you’re designing a program that will serve a small community, you wouldn’t want to use statewide numbers. Search instead for county- and tract-level stats.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is another great resource for relevant statistics.

Here, you can find numbers on unemployment and wages, both nationally and locally. In addition to these federal government agencies, local governments can provide statistics about their residents, including numbers of marriages, births, vehicle registrations, unemployment, businesses, and more.

Other nonprofit organizations near yours are also a good source for these types of statistics.

They will typically have more specific statistics. This is one good reason for developing a relationship with other nonprofits in your community.

You aren’t limited to demographic statistics in your grant. Statistics that are related to the theory that supports your program design are going to help you persuade the grantmaker. 

For example, if you’re trying to justify a program that provides low-income students with access to an after-school arts program, you could find statistics on the impact of arts education.

You might find that students who take four years of art score fifty points higher on their SAT than students who have fewer than four years of arts education. (I’m just making these numbers, but you get the idea!)

Evaluate the credibility of your sources

Not everything that you find while searching for secondary research is going to be worth including in your grant. You should only include information from credible sources.

You can be sure that information from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics will be credible. Here are some guidelines for determining the credibility of other sources of information:

• Pay attention to where something is published. Generally, you can trust information on academic databases, but if you’re finding your statistics elsewhere online, look at the end of the URL. Generally, .edu and .gov websites are more credible than .com websites. This doesn’t mean that everything published on a .com website is unreliable, but you’ll want to be more discerning with numbers you find on these sites.

• Take note of the context of the statistics you find. If you come across a website with unemployment stats that is full of highly emotional language and invectives, then you should take those numbers with a grain of salt. See if you can find another, less emotional source that also gives those same numbers.

• You should always check to see if the numbers you find are ones that other people have used and found elsewhere. Just because a lot of people say and believe something doesn’t make it true, but it is probably more credible if you find the same numbers in a few places.

Before I wrap up, I want to invite you to join Grant Writing Made Easy. In this course, I’ll teach you even more about finding research to support your work and how to write each section of the grant.