Start an EMS agency fact sheet to improve your grant application

Writing grant applications is a lot like emergency planning. A department's emergency planning officer plays a key role in planning for, protecting and maintaining public safety. One of the consequences of inadequate planning is the failure or inefficiency of public safety during a crisis. The same idea applies to the grant proposal process. Planning and preparedness must be conducted for funding to be efficient and successful.

Grant writing, just like emergency planning, needs to happen year round. Assistance to Firefighters Grant applications are due soon and many other grant cycles are seasonal and soon closing. Is your agency prepared for the next grant cycle?

All federal and state grant programs, as well as many private and community foundations, require internal statistics to be submitted with the application. And even if a grant application does not require internal statistics on performance and the response area, the narrative section is always enhanced through disclosure of recent figures.

If your agency is like most agencies you don't have a quality improvement program that can report performance data at the wave of a wand. Instead create an Agency One Sheet, which is a helpful tool for reporting internal statistics during the grant application process and post-award audits.

The benefits of the Agency One Sheet include:

• User friendly plug in and calculation of common performance statistics over a time period.
• Basic analysis of internal statistics and how they change over time.
• All the grant numbers needed, including service area demographics, are on one simple sheet.
• Grant writer access to correlated statistics which can be presented together in the narrative for a stronger overall application.
• Organized sheet for post-audit analysis and reporting after a successful grant application.

For easy reading, highlight the percent change to indicate important trends. The Agency One Sheet can also be used as the beginning of a quality improvement program. Find an Agency One Sheet in the related resources in the form of an Excel sheet.

What other standard statistics has your EMS agency tracked that are helpful in grant preparedness? Share those in the comments so we can update the Agency One Sheet template.