Is It Difficult To Get Business Grants?

by

Almost all entrepreneurs need to raise money at one time or another. And while there is quite a lot of money out there that is available to startups and small businesses from various sources of funding, there are far more entrepreneurs than there is available funds. For that reason, you must create a fundraising strategy that will be savvy and effective. There are seven main ways to raise money for your business. They are investments, loans, grants, donations, money from revenue, money from part time work, and various creative things you can try. In this article I will explain how difficult it is to get money from a grant, and whether it is going to be possible for you to raise money from grants.

There are many people on my apps who ask is it difficult to get business grants? And how do I get a business grant? To start, here is a brief video tutorial on how to raise money from grants.

Where Grants Are Available

If you are in United States, grants are available from many different sources. One of the biggest databases on grants is grants.gov which is the government site that aggregates the different possible grants. They have a great database of available grants so try to browse through their site. The difficulty with those grants is that this is the most visited grants site out there and you have quite a bit of competition, making it very difficult to get a grant.

Grants For Businesses Which Have Not Started

Many first time entrepreneurs look for grants to help them get started. There are almost no grants for businesses which have not started so if that is your situation, attempting to get a grant may be a big waste of time for you. Instead, you should try to focus on other ways to raise money. Here are some creative fundraising techniques:

And here is a list of 7 ways to raise money. One of those is grants of course, but the other six may be helpful:

If you like the videos on this page, please subscribe to our YouTube channel by clicking the subscribe button on the widget right above this text.

Most Grants Are Not For Business

The other challenge is that most grants from the government are aimed towards various nonprofits or research projects. So while business grants are available, these are not the majority of grants.

Techniques To Find Grants That Are Possible To Get

Some good practice things you can try to do is look for business grants locally. They may be local city grants that aim to help small businesses locally. Or they may be community grants. By community, I mean female focused local community, maybe your ethnic background, maybe immigrant communities, etc. There are many such communities, and sometimes they have grants available to people who are starting a business. Those may be good sources of grants because there is much less competition for those grants than on grants.gov for example. Create A Fundraising Plan Creating a fundraising plan can help to get you and your team organized and on the same page. The fundraising plan is not a document that you give to potential investors or any organization. Rather, it is a document maintained by you and your team to help you stay organized. Here is a tutorial for writing a fundraising plan. And here is an article answering a question I get rather often about fundraising proposals. Here is a video tutorial for how to create a fundraising plan.

And here is an article that should help you understand how much money you should be raising.

Further Fundraising Resources

If you are looking to raise money for your business, please check out our mobile apps that help you with fundraising. Here is the iOS fundraising app and here is the Android fundraising app. Here is the iOS business plan app and here is the Android business plan app.

Additionally, please subscribe to our YouTube channel in order to get more business and fundraising tips.

Author: Alex Genadinik

by