Grant Writing Confidential

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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After reading the first draft of “One of the Open Secrets of Grant Writing and Grant Writers: Reading,” I suggested that Jake lay down for a while, as he seemed to have worked himself into a frenzy over the subject of no reading versus some reading versus close reading versus . . . well, [...]

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A client recently said that she was moved by a description Isaac wrote of her target area in the needs assessment of her proposal, but she asked if we could make it more hopeful. Isaac strongly discouraged her—not as a way of disparaging her neighborhood, but because describing an area as terribly depressed makes the [...]

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This is YouthBuild season at Seliger + Associates, so I spent most of the weekend slaving over a hot YouthBuild proposal. YouthBuild has a curious take on the somewhat mysterious concept of “matching funds.” Newly minted grant writers will soon learn that there are two basic types of matching funds: in-kind and cash. The former [...]

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Faithful readers will recall my post on the perils of last minute changes to proposal concepts in Stay the Course: Don’t Change Horses (or Concepts) in the Middle of the Stream (or Proposal Writing). But, as Paul Harvey likes to say, now it is time for The Rest of the Story. . .
Just after I’d [...]

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It seems that the Bard is always topical, and All’s Well That Ends Well, one of Shakespeare’s “problem comedies” that may actually be a tragedy, comes to mind as an apropos title for a comedic tale that illustrates one of the many odd aspects of grant writing: why there is little reason to read comments [...]

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