Grant Writing Confidential

I’ve talked before about RFP absurdity, and now I’ll talk about lunacy: the HRSA “Service Expansion in Mental Health/Substance Services, Oral Health and Comprehensive Pharmacy Services” program (see the RFP in a Word file here) asks in Section 2.6, “Applicant describes how oral health services will be provided for special populations, such as MSFWs, homeless [...]

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In past posts, I’ve written about the foolishness of trying to use self-esteem as a metric (Self-Esteem—What is it good for? Absolutely Nothing), as well as the impossible question, “Who gets funded?” (Rock Chalk, Jayhawk, KU!— Lessons from Basketball for Grant Writers). An April 29, 2008 Wall Street Journal article, If at First You Don’t [...]

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Evaluation sections in proposals are both easy and hard to write, depending on your perspective, because of their estranged relationship with the real world. The problem boils down to this: it is fiendishly difficult and expensive to run evaluations that will genuinely demonstrate a program’s efficacy. Yet RFPs act as though the 5 – 20% [...]

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A faithful Grant Writing Confidential reader and fellow grant writer, Katherine, sent an email wanting my take on a public agency hiring a lobbying firm to seek federal earmarks. For those not familiar with the term, it means getting a member of Congress to slip a favored local project into a bill, bypassing normal reviews [...]

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—the same guys who brought us the stellar job after Hurricane Katrina—issued the Assistance to Firefighters Grants program on what Grants.gov says is March 26, 2008. But the deadline was April 04, 2008, which is absurdly short by any standards, let alone those of a federal agency. I sent an [...]

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My daughter will graduate from the William Allen White School of Journalism & Mass Communications at the University of Kansas in May. Although I’m not much of a sports fan, over the past four years, I’ve learned to love Jayhawks basketball and was delighted to see the Jayhwawks come back from a double digit deficit [...]

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RFP needs assessments will sometimes request data that aren’t readily available or just don’t exist. The question then becomes for you, the grant writer, what to do when caught between an RFP’s instructions and the reality of phantom data. When you can’t find it,
The Service Expansion in Mental Health/Substance Services, Oral Health and Comprehensive Pharmacy [...]

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Change is coming, albeit slowly, to Grants.gov, the the online system for Federal submissions. But, as with all things grants, the change is confusing at best.
When the feds first started transitioning to electronic submissions five or six years ago, different agencies used different approaches, resulting in general chaos. Eventually, Grants.gov became the default gateway. While [...]

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On a software blog, I found this post concerning an author who’d given himself an award:
‘You know, there were two strange things about that award, …Firstly, after I awarded it to myself, I felt oddly elated, as if some august academic body had suddenly realised my true worth as an author and had strained every [...]

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When first looking at a RFP, it is a good idea to remember Robbie the Robot from Lost in Space (the 60’s TV show, not the terrible movie remake) shouting “Danger Will Robinson,”* because when you open a RFP, you’re entering THE DANGER ZONE.
Those innocent looking RFPs are filled with traps. For example, if you [...]

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