From Application to Approval: 6 Steps to Successful Grant and Loan Applications

From routine infrastructure maintenance to new recreational developments, many municipalities face hardships in financing their community’s engineering initiatives. Federal and state organizations offer funding through grants and loans to assist communities through this hardship, but that comes with limitations.

Often, municipalities are overburdened and understaffed, making it more challenging to effectively apply for the available funding. Successful grant and loan writing requires a dedicated team, quality collaboration, technical expertise, and a unique blend of detailed yet concise applications.

Although writing each grant and loan requires unique processes, municipalities can expect six main steps throughout the application.

Step 1: Researching Grants and Loans

The first step is to understand what grants and loans are available. There are plenty of funding opportunities on the state and federal levels that your community can take advantage of. Every community must truly understand their needs prior to submitting for any grant or loan. To find such funding that fulfills your municipality’s initiative, the application team can research agencies such as those listed below.

Step 2: Assess Criteria

After finding grant and loan opportunities, the funding opportunity is assessed based on the municipality’s goals and needs. This criterion is largely dependent on each individual municipality and varies drastically based on the funding opportunity.

Step 3: Evaluate Effort Needed

After the opportunity is assessed and determined to be a good fit for the municipality, the effort required to complete the application is evaluated.

Successfully completing a grant or loan application requires a lot of time, resources, and expertise. Therefore, before beginning the application, the required efforts are evaluated to ensure they’re attainable for the team. Some of these efforts may include visualization of analyses, City Council approval, and public hearings.

Analysis and Map Creation

Depending on the funding opportunity and available reports, additional analyses and even visualization of analyses may prove crucial for the application’s effectiveness.

For any development related to community infrastructure, map creation is a key component of grant or loan applications. Visualizing the municipality’s current assets and identifying where gaps lie efficiently builds your argument about why your community needs the funding. It also provides evidence of how the funding will be used.

These analyses and maps also reinforce your proposal, illustrating your team’s dedication, professionalism, and expertise. They support your proposition to the community and assure the agency that smart, effective, and impactful decisions will be made with the funding.

City Council Approval

You may need approval from the municipality’s City Council to move forward with the application. This may be challenging depending on the type of funding, plans for implementation, and programming using the funding. Many different departments in the municipality may have different priorities, meaning internally evaluating how funding should be allocated becomes increasingly difficult for the organization. With contending priorities, loans can be more difficult to pursue than grants because the municipality must coordinate how they will repay the funds.

Each City Council has its own unique politics, with various factors that could be affected by the proposed funding opportunity. Because of this, it’s extremely valuable to have a team that understands your municipality’s goals and needs. This is prominent when trying to foresee likely questions and resolve them efficiently to present an airtight proposal to the City Council.

Public Hearings 

Depending on the municipality, public hearings – an open meeting held as a platform for residents to express their views on proposed plans for the community – could be held separately or as a part of City Council. This brings new challenges, requiring your team to efficiently articulate plans and how they will affect citizens in order to gain community support. Whatever the proposed plans are, there is bound to be some concern from the community on how it will affect them – and rightfully so.

That’s why having a trustworthy, honest, and well-respected team to present the proposed plan to the public is critical in the application process. Generally, gaining consent at public hearings is considered “public approval” on state applications.

Step 4: Advise Municipality

After evaluating the required efforts needed to successfully prepare for the grant or loan application, the team develops a strategy for the submittal. This strategy outlines each team member’s roles and expectations. It provides a blueprint of what the municipality needs to consider, how the application should be framed, and how the funding should be administered.

Step 5: Prepare and Submit Application

Finally, the application is prepared! Based on the data collected and analyses performed in the previous step, the team prepares the grant or loan application. The greatest challenge of this step is creating a delicate balance between storytelling, technical expertise, and great attention to detail.

There can be many nuances and requirements throughout the application and submittal processes. Because of this, it’s crucial for the team to be accurate and meticulous from the start of the application through the final submittal.

Step 6: Grant or Loan is Awarded or Rejected

Based on the award or rejection of the application, your team may respond differently. Take Metro Consulting Associates (MCA), for example.  

Upon award of the grant or loan, MCA will do a handful of things to ensure the application’s success. MCA can assist the City with administering the grant, completing the scope of work, providing financial planning for efficient use of the funding, and completing progress reports to submit to the City and appropriate regulatory agency.

If the submittal is rejected, MCA will meet with the regulatory agency to determine whether there are any issues with the application. Based on the findings of this meeting, MCA will summarize a plan for the municipality to ensure a successful award for the following year.

Over the past nine years of working with municipalities, MCA has built a reputable portfolio, with $58 million in grants and loans awarded across two different communities.

With a diverse skill set and comprehensive expertise, MCA offers municipalities the unique ability to identify potential funding sources for special projects, complete all necessary documents for applying for and securing funding, and assist our clients with the administration and reimbursement process throughout the grant or loan.

To learn more about how MCA can assist your community, contact us today!