Grant Writing Confidential

Isaac wrote about the dangers of online submissions in “Grants.gov Lurches Into the 21st Century,” which says that real world deadlines should be at least two days before the actual deadline to ensure that your proposal is actually received. This will help you avoid latency and response problems when every other applicant rushes to upload [...]

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We’ve added a link to “Acronyms” in Grant Writing Confidential’s header. The new page defines and explains many of the fun acronyms used by grant writers, so if you ever read in an RFP or elsewhere that “a CBO has been dispatched for BBQ to IHEs and the DOL ASAP,” you’ll know that “a community-based [...]

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Last week I complained that FEMA still hadn’t posted the Assistance to Firefighters Grant (AFG) Program 2008 Fire Prevention and Safety Grants to Grants.gov, which particularly rankled after last year’s fiasco.
My post went up on February 1, and lo! on February 2, the FY2008 Fire Prevention and Safety Grants program appeared on Grants.gov. And it [...]

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One of our favorite marketing slogansover the years has been, “We help you get your piece of the grant pie.” Well, Congress is cooking up the mother of all grant pies with the “infrastructure” component of President Obama’s stimulus package. If you’re wondering how your agency can get a bite of this tasty treat, you’re [...]

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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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This is the second of two posts; the first appears here.
In addition to being unsupported by the research demanded by the program, as described in this post, the Community-Based Abstinence Education Program (CBAE) RFP is also poorly organized. It separates concepts and ideas that belong together for no apparent reason. This is most evident in [...]

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The Community Based Abstinence Education Program (CBAE—see the .pdf RFP at the link) from the Administration on Children, Youth and Families (ACF) is a complicated, confusing, and poorly designed RFP based on suspect premises. Given that, however, it’s an excellent case study in how to deal with a variety of grant writing problems that relate [...]

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Before starting to write a proposal, it is good idea to understand the project concept and stick with this concept throughout the various drafts. If you don’t, the probability of creating an incomprehensible mess is high. In other words, it is a spectacularly bad idea to make big changes during the final stages of finishing [...]

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In Mordecai Richler’s hilarious novel Barney’s Version, a discussion arises:
“We’ve got a problem this year. There’s been a decline in the number of anti-Semitic outrages.”
“Yeah. Isn’t that a shame,” I said.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m against anti-Semitism. But every time some asshole daubs a swastika on a synagogue wall or knocks over a stone in [...]

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(This is an expanded version of an article that originally appeared at about.com.)
In writing a grant that describes a program, you are actually telling a story you want readers to believe. To do so, you need to make it as complete as possible. Journalists know that an effective lead paragraph in a news story tells [...]

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