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Grant Wrangler
Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch):
Grant Wrangler is a free grants listing service for teachers, librarians and parents to find funding for schools. Grant seekers and grant givers will use our site to share, communicate and collaborate outside of the application and award process.
Supporting organization:
Nimble Press
URL:
www.grantwrangler.com
City:
San Francisco
State/Region:
CA
Country:
US
Project Vision Statement & Potential Social Impact:
Foundations in the U.S gave $3.9 billion to educational causes in 2005. Yet the average classroom teacher spends almost $500 a year of their own money on classroom supplies. We created Grant Wrangler (http://www.grantwrangler.com) to help teachers, parents, media specialists and schools find the small grants, awards, and prizes that can help them improve learning opportunities for students.
The Grant Wrangler site is easy to search by grade, type of award, subject area, and deadline. We provide quick summaries of key information with a direct link to the application page of the program. We track relevant news, conferences, and information at http://blog.grantwrangler.com. By making it easier for teachers to find funds, we hope to improve classroom conditions and encourage more organizations to give more effectively to schools.
With more than $70 million in grants listed, we support thousands of teachers and their students. Readers of Edutopia selected Grant Wrangler as one of the best sites for grant information.
Sustainability (financial) model:
Grant Wrangler depends on advertising to support our free service. With a targeted audience of teachers, media specialists and parents, we hope to attract advertising from products and services for this audience. We currently earn enough through Google ads to support basic site costs. The larger our audience, the more sustainable our site and the more services we can offer to grant applicants. Our bulletin readers are loyal and interested in our newsletter.
We plan to roll out a subscription syndication service. Schools of education, school districts, state departments of education, and other organizations that help teachers design projects and write grants need fresh content and access to the latest funding opportunties. By subscribing to Grant Wrangler headlines, they can have that content right on their web sites.
Another way to build traffic and increase revenue is to become an interactive meeting place for people who apply for grants to give feedback to those who make grants. The more we learn about grant applicants, the better we can help grant givers improve their programs and their application process. We created a companion blog, but would like to enhance the programming on the site to allow members to share their experiences, rank applications, enroll as potential judges and become more engaged with grant givers.
Potential obstacles:
Our biggest challenge is getting the word out to more teachers to grow our audience and expand our bulletin subscriber list.
Our second challenge is engaging our audience. We know they come to the site for grants, but how could we leverage their collective experience to improve grant giving for all?
Our third challenge is adding to our grant list. We currently search the web to build our database of grants. As we become better known, we hope that grant giving organizations come to us first to list their programs.
Resource Needs:
We need advertising and partner links to share our success. We also need programming help to set up our subscription service. We need expert help to strategize about adding the most effective social networking tools to our site. We want to engage users and leverage their collective knowledge through recommendations, feedback, and tagging clouds.
Key Milestones:
Our research shows the teachers are most actively seeking grants at the beginning of the school year and we would like to roll out Grant Wrangler 2.0 in September 2007.
April: review social networking, technology options, and speak to users about their needs.
May: Define an implementation strategy, focusing on the easiest to implement, highest impact changes to the site to increase traffic and retain visitors.
June: Paper-based usability tests and focus groups.
July: Build out of systems.
August: Testing and introduction to users. September: Launch advertising and viral marketing campaign to raise awareness.
Project Summary:
Grant Wrangler (http://www.grantwrangler.com) is a free, online listing service of grants for K-12 schools. With more than $70 million in grants listed, we help teachers, parents, media specialists and schools find the small grants, awards, and prizes that can help them improve learning opportunities for students.We want to bring the grant seekers voice to grant givers to improve the process.
Comments
More proposal information
I would like to add a bit more detail and explanation to my nomination form:
More on Sustainability
Another goal for the Grant Wrangler site is to become an interactive meeting place for people who apply for grants to give feedback to those who make grants. The more we learn about grant seekers, the better we can help grant givers improve their programs and their application process. We created a companion blog and have started profiling grant seekers and grant givers, but would like to enhance the programming on the site to allow members to share their experiences, rank applications, enroll as potential judges and become more engaged with grant givers.
More on Obstacles
We know of open source and other site building tools that allow membership log-in conversations and other sharing tools. We need help integrating that into our existing site to bring more social exchange and richness to the site.
Our Milestones
January 2006—Launched Grant Wrangler Web site and bulletin with 600 visitors our first month.
May 2006—Added Google Ad words to the site to generate revenue.
June 2006—Launched blog.grantwrangler.com.
September 2006—Surveyed Grant Wrangler Bulletin readers about interests and experience
January 2007—Hired a full-time “Grant Wrangler” to search for grants.
March 2007—Site has more than 7,000 sessions per month, averaging a 26% growth per month. Grant Wrangler Bulletin has more than 2,600 subscribers with a click-through rate of 47.35%.
Value perspective
Sandra Dickinson
Kind of along the lines of the previous comment: GrantWrangler has different value depending upon whether one is a grant-seeker or a grant-giver.
Your proposal indicates that you believe grant-seekers would pay a subscription fee to receive up-to-date information about grant opportunities.
But - when you talk about "advertising" revenue, sounds like you suggest you are looking for providers of general products/services to the education market.
Could your "advertisers" be the grant providers themselves? Would grant providers pay to have their grant opportunities communicated directly and efficiently to their target audience?
Could your sustainability model be like a "matching" service that both parties are willing to pay some "commission" for?
My own project Selearninggames is dedicated to increasing the profitability of nonprofit earned income ventures. Your comments and feedback on my project would be so on target and so welcome.
Value
We have had a couple of inquiries from grant providers about advertising on our site and one of the Google ads is a grant giving organization. However, our goal is to list as many grants as possible in a searchable way so that teachers can quickly find the grants most relevant. We want to be an unbiased provider, so our general policy is not advertise grants. We have a complimentary service evaluating grant applications and hosting online applications for grant givers.
Relation to Donor Choose?
I can certainly understand the difference between Grant Wrangler and Donor Choose, but it might be obscure to those less familiar with the overall field. Do you consider yourself competitive (i.e. for funding or mindshare)? Do you see any collaborative opportunities?
Different from Donor's Choose
Donor's Choose helps donors find teachers they can support. We actually list Donor's Choose on Grant Wrangler to encourage teachers to go to Donor's Choose. Grant Wrangler lists the grant programs and awards that a teacher might apply for. Instead of posting a wish list and hoping a donor will find them, a teacher can search for a grant by subject area, grade level or donor. Or click on the calendar date and find opportunities by deadline.
We co-exist with Donor's Choose and list them as a resource for teachers in Grant Wrangler.