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Grant applications

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Key Information

Project leads can find many of Raft’s statutory documents and information on RaftTalk.

A multi-stage process

One of the many benefits of fiscal sponsorship is the opportunity to apply for grants otherwise only available to 501(c)(3) public charities. The grant application process has several phases:

  • Exploring potential opportunities
  • Writing grant application responses
  • Submitting grant application, using our key information
  • Waiting for a response
  • Receiving a rejection or acceptance email or letter
  • If accepted, signing a grant agreement
  • Facilitating payment(s) to Raft
  • Submitting grant report(s)

When to involve Raft

Throughout the process, Raft will need to be involved at several points in the process:

  1. When you submit a grant application, you are required to fill out this form
  2. If you need help filling out an application, if information you need is not included on the key information page, or if you would like us to review your application (not required), feel free to reach out
  3. If you are approved, we will be the ones to sign the grant agreement, and you will need us to provide payment information to the funder
  4. When we sign the grant agreement, we will take note of any required grant reports and remind you to submit them

A note on government grants

Government grants are far more complicated and costly to manage than other types of contributions. Raft generally does not apply for federal grants, and all others are evaluated on a case-by-case basis. For some reimbursable grants, we can support it as long as the project is able to front the money. But it depends on the details, and . Please contact us if a government grant interests you to discuss whether we can serve as your sponsor for the particular grant.

Grant budgets

We recommend including a line in your proposed budget for Raft’s administrative cost allocation. A line for “administrative costs” or “admin cost allocation” is usually sufficient.

Grant reports

For many grants, a narrative and financial report is required at the end of the grant period. Sometimes mid-term reports are requested as well. The details, from timing, number of reports, and exactly how much writing or detail is requested, can vary significantly from grant to grant.

It is the responsibility of the fiscally sponsored project to author required grant reports, although Raft does its best to keep track of reporting deadlines and remind projects of this obligation.

Financial reporting

Not all grants require detailed financial reporting. If your grant does, however, there are two methods available for tracking the financial information required for a grant report:

  1. Tagging all expenses to be associated with the grant with its associated Grant ID, which can be provided by the Raft team (email us)
  2. Moving funds into a new “Project” on Open Collective and submitting all expense requests for the grant to that profile

As long as one of these two methods is followed,1 Raft will be able to supply a report from its accounting system.

When to track

Whether or not we need to track expenses by grant at all is typically a matter of how restrictive the grant is and how demanding the reporting requirements are. Thus most unrestricted foundation grants do not need to be tracked on a per-expense basis, whereas many restricted grants need detailed reports, and many government grants even need to see an itemized list of expenses.

Footnotes

  1. If you do not follow one of these methods, you will need to use the transactions export on Open Collective and manually compile the report. ↩

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