Grant Writing Confidential

Last Sunday I posed the question, “Searching for Talent Search: Where Oh Where Has the Talent Search RFP Gone And Why is It A Secret?.” I still don’t know why the RFP release date was a secret, but on Wednesday, the Department of Education finally published the Talent Search application instructions. Hallelujah, or as my [...]

[Read more →]

UPDATE: Talent Search has finally appeared, and the RFP vindicates much of what Isaac wrote below. Having been in business for over 17 years, Seliger + Associates has lots of spies. Well, not spies exactly, but clients, former and current, program officers and assorted grant cognoscenti who send us interesting nuggets. Recently, one made it [...]

[Read more →]

While researching this week’s e-mail Grant Alert newsletter, I needed to find out more about the Department of the Interior’s (DOI) FY 2011 Recovery Implementation Fund. I searched for it on Grants.gov, which kept hanging instead of returning information. But there’s a way around this: you can restrict Google searches to a single domain. If [...]

[Read more →]

I hope faithful readers who are also federal grantees have been nice to their Program Officers, because this could be the year that Christmas comes early and often. I recently wrote about the unfolding FY 2011 federal budget fiasco. While cruising in the droptop to Palm Spring this weekend to visit relatives, I got to [...]

[Read more →]

People with advanced degrees and university professors are (presumably) good at lots of things, like publishing the original research they’re trained to produce, but they aren’t always good grant writers—especially for the kinds of social and human service proposals that Seliger + Associates often writes. I think there are lots of reasons for this: Academics [...]

[Read more →]

If you’ve ever been to Jamaica, which I visited many years ago, no matter what is going wrong at the moment, the response from most Jamaicans is likely to be No problem mon! In case you missed this tidbit in the crush of off-year election news, Congress decided not to even try to pass a [...]

[Read more →]

HUD just issued the FY 2010 NOFA (Notice of Funding Availability, which is HUD-speak for RFP) for the Lead-Based Paint Hazard Control Program (LBPHC) program (the fiscal year ends in less than a month, but better late than never). We’ve written six funded LBPHC grants over the years and are very familiar with the program, [...]

[Read more →]

Faithful readers will remember “Why Winning an Olympic Gold Medal is Not Like Getting a Carol M. White Physical Education Program (PEP) Grant,” in which I opined that in getting grants, the race does not always belong to the swift. It seems I scooped the New York Times. In today’s edition, Stephanie Strom tells the [...]

[Read more →]

In “So, How Much Grant Money Should I Ask For?,” we discussed a sometimes delicate issue for nonprofits: picking a grant request amount. Our standard answer: ask for the maximum because zeroes are cheap. Funders will sometimes cut down your budget but almost never increase it. Some obnoxious programs, however, won’t tell you how much [...]

[Read more →]

In “Why Winning an Olympic Gold Medal is Not Like Getting a Carol M. White Physical Education Program (PEP) Grant,” Isaac wrote: “Many grant applicants are under the delusion from years of watching the Olympics and similar sports competitions that, if their application receives the highest review score, the grant will automatically be awarded.” One [...]

[Read more →]