One of the many interesting aspects of running a general-purpose grant writing firm is that we are often called upon to write complex proposals covering subjects about which we know little or nothing, as I discussed in No Experience, No Problem: Why Writing a Department of Energy (DOE) Proposal Is Not Hard For A Good [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Clients'
How to Write About Something You Know Nothing About: It’s Easy, Just Imagine a Can Opener
February 14th, 2010 · 4 Comments
Tags: Advice · Clients · Government · Grants · How-to · Research
How’d You Like a 20% Discount on Grant Writing? You Got It, As Long as You are Willing to Go Against Conventional Wisdom!
January 24th, 2010 · No Comments
Jake wrote recently about the perils of being too creative as a grant writer in Never Think Outside the Box: Grant Writing is About Following the Recipe, not Creativity. This post elaborates on the invisible fence of “Convention Wisdom” (CW) that forces us grant writers to remain in the box.
CW is an amorphous blob of [...]
Tags: Advice · Clients · Grants · Stories
Never Think Outside the Box: Grant Writing is About Following the Recipe, not Creativity
January 10th, 2010 · 4 Comments
A New Yorker cartoon I like:
If you write proposals, don’t be this cat.
Any time you’re writing to an RFP—which, for grant writers, is virtually all the time—you’re required to respond to the RFP. If the RFP says, “give services to 300 participants per year,” you should say in your proposal that you’re going to serve [...]
Tags: Advice · Budgets · Clients · Government · Grants · Stories
Why Seliger + Associates Never Responds to RFPs/RFQs for Grant Writing Services
December 27th, 2009 · No Comments
Faithful readers will note that we regularly discuss RFPs, NOFAs, FOAs, SGAs and other government acronyms denoting that grant funds are available. Jake in particular likes to fulminate about especially dumb RRPs, as he does in Deconstructing the Question: How to Parse a Confused RFP and Adventures in The Broadband Initiatives Program. Despite marinating in [...]
Tags: Advice · Clients · Grants · Stories
I Was Right: Seliger + Associates Writes a $2.5 Million Funded Department of Energy (DOE) Smart Grid Investment Grant (SGIG) Proposal
November 2nd, 2009 · 2 Comments
A $2.5 million Department of Energy Smart Grid Investment Grant (SGIG) proposal we wrote for an electric utility company was funded last week. While we write lots of funded proposals, this one was especially gratifying. Faithful readers will remember that last April I wrote No Experience, No Problem: Why Writing a Department of Energy (DOE) [...]
Tags: Clients · Grants · Stimulus · Stories
Does Seliger + Associates “Care” About Our Clients?
September 20th, 2009 · No Comments
After almost 17 years in business, I thought I had been asked every possible question about grant writing and our services, almost all of which are answered on our web page or in one of our 115 blog posts. As a result, most initial phone calls are fairly routine. So I was rendered almost speechless—a [...]
Tags: Clients · Grants · Questions · Stories
One Person, One Proposal: Don’t Split Grant Writing Tasks
August 23rd, 2009 · 2 Comments
Would-be grant applicants often look at the dizzyingly long, arduous road to a finished proposal and think, “There’s gotta be a better way than assigning one person to write and assemble the entire beast.” They consider the RFP for a while and hit on a brilliant strategy: divide up the proposal like you’re cutting a [...]
Tags: Advice · Clients · Grants · How-to
True Believers and Grant Writing: Two Cautionary Tales
August 9th, 2009 · 8 Comments
Like Spartacus in the eponymous movie*, we’ve been toiling in the grant salt mines for over 16 years. Over that time, about two-thirds of our clients have been nonprofits, while the rest are a mix of public agencies and—in a recent change due to the Stimulus Bill—for-profit businesses. The popular imagination thinks that all nonprofits [...]
Tags: Advice · Clients · Grants · Stories
Bratwurst and Grant Project Sustainability: A Beautiful Dream Wrapped in a Bun
July 19th, 2009 · 7 Comments
In many if not most human services RFPs, you’ll find an unintentionally hilarious section that neatly illustrates the difference between the proposal world and the real world: demanding to know how the project will be sustained beyond the end of the grant period. Every time a funder asks this question, the answer is always the [...]
Tags: Advice · Clients · Grants · How-to
Professional Grant Writer At Work: Don’t Try Writing A Transportation Electrification Proposal At Home
May 10th, 2009 · 3 Comments
Seliger + Associates was recently hired to edit a proposal for the charmingly titled U.S. Department of Energy National Energy and Technology Laboratory Recovery Act-Transportation Electrification (NETLRATE)* program. We edit proposals all the time; the unusual part of this assignment is our client, which is a successful tech company with lots of engineer types instead [...]