Grant Writing Confidential

One question clients often ask is how much money they should apply for in a given grant request. Our standard answer: ask for the maximum because zeroes are cheap. As with many aspects of grant writing, there is no right answer to this question. It’s impossible to know. But all other things being equal, you [...]

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Hey you!! That’s right, you! The nonprofit Executive Director lurking in the back. Confused about how to write foundation proposals? I shouldn’t really do this, but, just between me and you, and if you promise not to tell anyone, I’ll let you in on some of the secrets of writing foundation proposals. Many nonprofit folks, [...]

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Although this might not seem like it should be a problem, figuring out where to start the narrative section of a proposal can sometimes be difficult: do you write to the evaluation criteria, to something labeled “narrative,” or to a series of text boxes? Federal programs are particularly fond of hiding the salami, as anyone [...]

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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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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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Once you have a sufficiently large agency with concomitantly large grant writing needs and multiple funding sources, you’re going to start facing problems of scale. This means a single person is going to find managing all the efforts of the agency steadily harder, and that single person will eventually be overwhelmed. If you’re big enough, [...]

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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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Good writing is inextricably linked to reading, and this is true not only of grant writing, but of virtually any genre. Most of what you pick up through reading is subliminal: you’re not consciously studying ideas, or rhythms, or structure, or vocabulary,* but you absorb them through osmosis regardless of your intention. You learn words [...]

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People regularly discover Grant Writing Confidential by searching for template proposals. For example, two recent searches that turned up in our query logs include “carol m. white pep sample proposal” and “free grant writing samples.” At least the former person is more likely to find something useful than the latter, since a generic proposal is [...]

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All three of you masochistic enough to read the Federal Register on a regular basis might have noticed that the Economic Development Administration (EDA) posted a couple of notices about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 Recovery Act Funding, which exemplifies many of the trends we’ve been discussing while also showing that it’s [...]

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