What grants have you done?

Competition Fundraising
1

Hi,
I was just curious what other teams have done grant wise this past year. Such as what grants did you apply for (if any) and did you get them. maybe how much it was worth is good as well. Other details are always appreciated. The reason I am asking is I feel like we have run our sponsors dry (we are a rural team) and big companies seem hard to get, so we are considering resorting to grants and was wondering what are the “best” ones.

1 Like
2

Our team did the Platt grant and the Verizon grant. We asked for 5k from each, hoping to get 2.5k. We have not gotten a response from either, but we just turned in Verizon recently.

Hope this helps and good luck.

3

The coach of our team is currently in a grant-writing class so during these summer month when we do not have things to do we fundraise. This year we are focusing on grants. We have applied to Lowe’s, P&G, Walmart, and many others. We have been asking for 5k from each. We tried to do the Best Buy grant but did not qualify because they do not give money to schools.

4

We received a Rookie JC Penney Grant and a NASA grant. I believe both were for 6.5K. The JCP was solely used for registration for FRC, and the NASA for purchasing parts, tools, etc. We still have some of that money left over.

I’m not the grant writer at my school, but I’m pretty sure JCP will supply grants to second year and even some veteran teams.

5

Thanks for all the quick input. Our team has already applied for 9 grants this summer for 5K each. We hope to get at least one.

6

That is pretty darn impressive.

I spent this whole summer so far and intially from late January, trying to do one.
It ended up being 61 pages though…and submitted 2 weeks ago.

The hard part is when you actually get it and reporting back. :ahh:

7

Our team got the Boeing grant. It covered our kit of parts and first regional (5,000). It was super helpful. To get it, a person that works for boeing must submit your team for the grant. We have been sponsored by them for the past few years. Super helpful, and well worth looking into

8

what grants did you apply for and how do apply for the nasa grant.

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Most of our grants end up being about five pages on average. I couldn’t stand doing 60+ pages for a single grant. how much did you ask/get on that one?

I will see if I can remember all of them. Lowe’s, Verizon, Best Buy, Adobe, Ford, AMD, Motorola, 3M, and Coke (plus JCP and NASA from the fall). we did not finish the Toshiba grant yet.
We were hoping to find a lot more, but that is all we could find. But Boeing does look like a good possibility.

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Does anyone have their NASA or other grant proposals for me to look over, I am trying to prepare my team for a sustaining grant after our loss of sponsorship this year.

11

What’s the Platt grant. I couldn’t find any info about it when i googled it. may have been google-ing the wrong thing though

12

I believe it is handled through your Regional Director, it might not be something that can be found online, I know that when our team submitted we simply emailed our proposal to the person in charge of the Oregon region submissions.

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I will see if I can remember all of them. Lowe’s, Verizon, Best Buy, Adobe, Ford, AMD, Motorola, 3M, and Coke (plus JCP and NASA from the fall). we did not finish the Toshiba grant yet.
We were hoping to find a lot more, but that is all we could find. But Boeing does look like a good possibility.

I’m curious on how you qualified for the Best Buy grant? When we took the eligibility test it said we were not able to apply. When I looked further into the reasons why I discovered a clause stating that they do not give grants to schools. I’m just curious.

14

Best Buy does give grants to schools.
Maybe you are referring to a different/revised one?

15

A great many companies give grants to 501©3 foundations.

A school is NOT a 501©3.

However, many school systems have one or more 501©3 foundations that are setup to support the school. Those foundations MAY be eligible to serve as a conduit for the grant.

For example, in our school district many schools have football booster or band booster foundations at the school. In our district we have a general academic foundation available to all the district schools. This particular foundation is setup to specifically access grants such as Best Buy and other similar organizations that give grants to academically oriented 501©3 foundations.

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16

I just went back and looked and I realized where we made the mistake by reading something wrong. Thanks for the clarification.

17

That is correct. We got it at either Davis or SVR. Most likely SVR 2010.

I would suggest looking into getting a new sponsor rather than doing grants. Our team currently does grants to earn money, however we have learned that they are not the best things to rely on, unless done correctly or in a huge mass. As a result, we are looking for sponsors.

18

Some resources here:
http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/content.aspx?id=14042

Rich Kressly did a great job on hints for preparing a NASA grant in 2009. Much of this information should still be relevant. This paper is housed in the white papers on these forums.

Also some grant writing resources on NEMO: http://www.firstnemo.org/resources.htm

19

You should also look for small, local foundations. One year, we received a grant from a foundation that was created in memory of a local public figure. We’ve applied for grants from local women’s clubs and other small regional foundations.

Hope this helps!

20

Thanks for the idea. I never really thought of that. But I doubt there will be many just because of our small city size (which is the reason we’re reverting to grants in the first place)

Thanks anyways