Beginner Grantseeking

Virtual Workshop – Live/Online

Fee: $95 for MCN members / $135 for nonmembers

Register Now

Where does the grantseeking process start? How do you find funders interested in your organization and your programs? There are proven tactics for finding funders that are a good fit for your organization–and plentiful resources online–many of them free!

In this three-hour live online training, we’ll discuss the best ways to begin grantseeking (which is closer than you think!), explore four good places to start looking, work through a proven process for finding funder information, discover how to “dig deeper” into a foundation’s interests, and determine the best way for you to start capturing what you are learning about your organization and its potential funders.

This training is specifically designed to help you gain important grantseeking competencies and skills related to researching, identifying, and matching funding resources to meet specific needs. Through this training, you will:

• Know more about major trends in grant funding
• Apply methods of locating funding sources
• Explore techniques to learn about specific funders
• Determine the right method for maintaining, tracking, and updating information on potential funders
• Identify fundable programs and projects for your organization
• Locate best matches between funders and specific programs
• Interpret grant application request for proposal guidelines and requirements to accurately assess funder intent

Workshop participants will receive a digital copy of the Handbook for Successful Grant Writing that covers topics ranging from research and planning to a glossary of commonly used terms. The Handbook is only available to participants and is not otherwise for sale.

This session focuses on the nonprofit funding landscape and the process of seeking grants. The second session in this series is Beginning Grantwriting, which centers around writing grants. There is also an Intermediate Grantwriting session that serves as a writing workshop. NEW in 2025 is State Grantwriting 101, which offers an overview of the Minnesota state grantmaking process. Visit MCN’s Event Calendar to register for one or all.

 

Event Details

This virtual event will take place on the Zoom platform. Your access link will be emailed to you the day before the event after 12 p.m.

This session will be recorded. The recording will be made available to registrants after the live event.

Captioning is provided automatically through Zoom. For information on requesting CART, ASL, or another accommodation, please visit our Registration Policies page.

To learn more about events, registration, and payment, visit our Event & Registration FAQ page.

 

Speaker Information

Melia Smith
Director of Annual Giving, Summit Academy OIC

Melia Smith is a community-driven fundraiser, who like most people of her contemporary, fell backwards into fundraising. She has worked the spectrum of fundraising roles from data entry to leading a development department. She has broad experience in the field and her expertise lies in establishing, analyzing and overhauling fundraising operations, community-centered donor strategy development, and institutional and professional fundraising writing. Melia’s experiences in a number of diverse fundraising environments have given her holistic perspective on developing solutions to systemic challenges in fundraising spaces.

Her career has been shaped by working in challenging environments where she has been able to lean into leadership roles as a strategist and community builder, leveraging skills like project management, coaching, and conflict mediation and management to build collaborative and human-centered working environments. Melia’s fundraising praxis is rooted in justice and she excels when she gets opportunities to blend traditional and grassroots fundraising practices to advance a more equitable philanthropic community.