How to Use Grants.gov to Find Federal Grants

This video is a part of the FUNDED! Successful grant writing for your nonprofit in the age of scarcity series. This is by Dr. Rick Hoefer. We look at using www.grants.gov to search for federal grant opportunities. Hello, I just want to give you a bit of orientation to grants.gov. This is the website, the home page -- grants.gov and we are going to find grant opportunities, that's what we are looking for. So we click there on the left side and then what we are going to do is we are going to start with a basic search. So click on the basic search arrows and then instead of using the basic search lets go to the advance search. Okay, so now what we want to do is still be looking for domestic violence programs as the key word search but we are also going to look for archived and closed opportunities because we want to get a list of all the possibilities, even if they are closed right now, they may open up in the future, we want to keep track of the deadlines were even for those. So we might want to have all days for dates, and then search for eligibility here we have one that says nonprofit and we are assuming that's what we are assuming we are going to be. Let's search for... we happen to know that the department of justice and the sub agency that handles this primarily is the office on violence against women, so we click that and we are going to have all funding instrument types and then we search. And here is what we have. This is in no particular order other than the number, and the funding number is not that important to us. But let's click here twice and now we have the most recent close dates which as of today, which is June 1st ... it was May 22nd. So here you can see that there are none that are currently open but you can see the ones when they were due. So let's just take a look at this... what we have here. Here we go -- let's try *** assault services culturally specific grant program. And this tells us a little bit about it. It was posted January 30th of 2013, so it may post about that time every year so again we may want to be putting together a calendar of when to be looking for possible grants on this topic. And then if you scroll down a little it gives you a description of what the program is about and in this case it's the goal of the SASP culturally specific grant program is to create, maintain and expand sustainable *** assault services provided by culturally specific organizations, which are uniquely situated to respond to the needs of *** assault victims within culturally specific populations. So if that's what you are looking for, then this is just perfect. And here we go -- if you click on this link, it will bring up the actual RFP. So you can see exactly what they were looking for at that time and you can begin to develop a grant application for this type of program, even though its already expired and this has been archived. If you scroll down, it will give you the grants.gov number assigned to the announcement, so you can use that as a search term later on. And then, look that contents, and there is all sorts of great information here that you would want to know about, if you were to write a grant application for the next year. Okay, so that's been a quick review of how you use grants.gov to search for grant opportunities. This video using www.grants.gov to serach for federal grant opportunities has been brought to you by Dr. Rick Hoefer, it's a part of the FUNDED! Successful grant writing for your nonprofit in the age of scarcity series.