Grant Writing Confidential

We’re skeptics on the subject of grant writing training as such, but this summer I taught a “Technical Writing” course for juniors and seniors at the University of Arizona. The original course design wasn’t very challenging, so I decided to make it more nutritious by building a unit around grant writing; in a fit of [...]

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Faithful readers will remember our post “Seliger’s Quick Guide to Developing Federal Grant Budgets.” This is a companion post for developing foundation budgets. Unlike federal budgets, foundations rarely provide budget forms, or, if they do, the form is usually fairly simple and most grant writers, even novices, should be able to figure out how to [...]

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When you find an ambiguity or outright contradiction in an RFP, it’s time to contact the Program Officer, whose phone number and e-mail address is almost always stashed somewhere in the RFP. The big problem with contacting a Program Officer is simple: you can’t trust what she or he tells you. The formal RFP—particularly if [...]

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The kinds of skills you learn by grant writing don’t only apply to grant writing. Loyal Grant Writing Confidential readers know that in my other life I’m a grad student in English Literature at the University of Arizona. Last week I took my MA written exam, which consisted of three questions that I had to [...]

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Proposal abstracts are funny beasts: they’re supposed to summarize an entire proposal, presumably before the reader reads the proposal, and they’re often written before the writer writes the proposal. Good abstracts raise the question of whether one really needs to read the rest of the document. While RFPs sometimes provide specific abstract content—in which case [...]

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Many novice grant writers, and more than a few old hands, are terrified of federal grant budgets. Oddly, I find budget development one of the easiest aspects of grant writing, so I thought I would provide Seliger’s Quick Guide to Developing Federal Grant Budgets: * When you first read the RFP, ignore the budget instructions, [...]

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Most social and human services get delivered in one of two ways: on a drop-in basis or a case-managed basis. The latter is often characterized as “wraparound supportive services,” and is the subject of this post. If you’ve ever been to a Boys and Girls Club or YMCA, you’ve received services on a “drop-in” basis, [...]

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My recent post, “Grant Writing from Recession to Recession: This is a Great Time to Start a New Nonprofit,” featured a phone call I received from a “Mrs. Smith” who inquired about using our services to fund her new nonprofit. A few days ago, we received this comment from another real world Mrs. Smith, in [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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