Susan Kistler on Locating Grants and RFPs

My name is Susan Kistler, AEA’s Executive Director, and contributor of each Saturday’s aea365 post. Last June, I wrote about Funding Opportunities for Evaluators. Today, I want to expand a bit in that arena. Over the past six months, we’ve been working to improve our listening and identifying processes, to find evaluation Requests for Proposals (RFPs) and grant opportunities to share. Two resources in particular have proven useful:

Rad Resource: Philanthropy News Digest has a customizable RFP Alert system that sends RFP alerts right to your email. This is different from subscribing to their newsletter; instead, you must set up a free account on their website. Then, select profile -> edit profile -> Newsletters/Alert Subscriptions. This great service isn’t an easy find, and takes about two minutes to set up, but it allows you to customize the information you receive by RFP subject and by region.

Rad Resource: Grants.gov allows you to find and apply for United States Federal Grants. Using the Subscription tab or button, you can sign up to receive daily notices of all new grant opportunities or set up advanced criteria to hone in on your area of specialization.

The above two resources have proven the most valuable so far in identifying funding opportunities for evaluators. The AEA staff monitors these on a daily basis and adds opportunities that we find to the AEA Headlines and Resources list. However, our review is a general one, wherein we’re striving to identify opportunities with an evaluation focus. If you are working within a larger firm or agency, subscribing to either or both of the above will help you to identify opportunities that may incorporate evaluation, but have a broader focus.

Hot Tip: As in June, I recommend signing up for AEA’s weekly headlines and resources list that includes the funding opportunity finds for that week. The list is posted each Sunday to AEA’s Listserv, EVALTALK, and appears in the news listing on AEA’s LinkedIn group. But, to receive it in a nice stand-alone compact form, you can subscribe to the headlines and resources list as a single weekly compilation via the Headlines and Resources website.

Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

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