Grant Writing Confidential

Susan wants to know: I am being told that I must become a “grant writer” for my law enforcement agency within a month or so. There is not enough time to apprentice so they want me to learn everything I need to know in a 2 day workshop!!! Any suggestions? Suggestions! I’m filled with ‘em. [...]

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A recent email from a prospective client got me to thinking about the best time to prospect and apply for grants. Our would-be client presented the idea of hiring us to his board. One board member pointed out that the organization lacked a current strategic plan, the last one having expired at the end of [...]

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We try hard to keep our proposals fresh by making our project concepts reflect what is going on in communities today—not what the world was like when we entered the business in 1993. For example, several years ago we began including references to emerging social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) in many proposals, mostly [...]

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A continuing avalanche of bad economic news confirms the upheaval in the nonprofit world that I’ve been blogging about for the last few months. To paraphrase David Bowie in “Changes:” Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes (Turn and face the strain) Ch-ch-Changes Don’t want to be a richer [organization] Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes (Turn and face the strain) Ch-ch-Changes Just gonna have to [...]

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Who is in charge of completing and submitting your proposal? You should immediately be able to say, “Jane Doe. Or “John Doe.” Whoever. Can you instantly think of that person’s name—the person who gets the praise if the proposal is submitted on time and technically correct or the blame if it isn’t? If you can’t, [...]

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As any consultant knows, some clients will hate you and some will love you. That’s certainly true of us, but the funny thing is that clients love and hate us for exactly the same reason. It sounds counterintuitive, so let me explain using a recent “we love you!” e-mail from a client as an example: [...]

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A friend of mine just applied to medical residencies, and in the process he worked himself into a lather over what specialty he wanted to choose and how he should order his preferred programs. He made a nearly fatal mistake of the kind many grant applicants do: he waited until the last minute to make [...]

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We mentioned “the laugh test” in “So, How Much Grant Money Should I Ask For? And Who’s the Competition?” Whenever you’re asking for money, you shouldn’t request a wildly implausible amount. If your organization has a $100,000 budget and you ask a foundation for $10M, you’ve failed the laugh test. As we said in “When [...]

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I received a phone call last week from a woman (let’s call her “Mrs. Smith”) who just started a tiny new nonprofit in South Central LA during this never-ending recession. She wants to help the growing number of homeless youth and unemployed young adults hanging out on the streets. Mrs. Smith’s call reminded me of [...]

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We regularly get e-mails and phone calls from people who think they can get money for nothing. They don’t know anything about how grants or grant writing works and apparently don’t want to learn. This is mind-boggling to me because it means such people are wasting their time and wasting our time for no particular [...]

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