Funder Research Report

(Worth 5% of your grade; due March 10)

Overview

One of the most important (and most difficult) aspects of pursuing a grant opportunity is funding the right funding source. Although federal agencies and private foundations award billions of dollars to grant applicants each year, each funding organization maintains strict requirements defining who is eligible to apply, what types of projects qualify, and how such projects must be implemented.

For this short assignment, you will research a federal agency or private foundation and create a one-page document that succinctly summarizes the answers to the who, where, what, when, why, and how questions about the organization. Perhaps most importantly, you will make a recommendation about whether or not your classmates should pursue funding opportunities with this organization for their Unit #2 proposals. When have completed your report, you will share it with your classmates by uploading a copy of your document to a forum on the class website.

Assignment Details

• Your report should fit on one side of one page.
• This assignment will require you to summarize a great deal of information in a very short space. As such, you will need to determine what your readers “need to know,” and what you simply “want to tell,” focusing on the former and discarding the latter.
• When your funder research report is complete, save it as a PDF file, named as follows: “Full Name Funder Research Report.doc” (for instance, “Quinn Warnick Funder Research Report.pdf”) and upload it to the class website by 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday, March 10. This deadline is important, because you will be meeting with your teams that day to discuss funding options and select a funding agency for your Unit #2 proposal.
  

Evaluation Criteria

Your funder research report will be evaluated based on how well you:

• summarize key details about the funding organization, eligibility requirements, deadlines, etc.
• select and organize the most important information into a one-page document.
• implement the principles of document design we have studied this semester.
• follow the conventions of Standard Written English (spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc.)