A faithful Grant Writing Confidential reader and fellow grant writer, Katherine, sent an email wanting my take on a public agency hiring a lobbying firm to seek federal earmarks. For those not familiar with the term, it means getting a member of Congress to slip a favored local project into a bill, bypassing normal reviews [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Questions'
Stuck on Stupid: Hiring Lobbyists to Chase Earmarks
April 19th, 2008 · 1 Comment
Tags: Advice · Clients · Grants · Questions · Stories
Perfectionism Revisited
March 1st, 2008 · No Comments
Earlier I wrote about The Perils of Perfectionism, in which I made the case for just getting it done with regards to proposal writing. Now I’ve found another example of the same idea in Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. The narrator says: “As they keep telling you in Basic, doing something constructive at once is better [...]
Tags: Advice · Grants · Questions
Grant Writing Credentials Redux
February 13th, 2008 · 4 Comments
Two comments on Credentials for Grant Writers—If I Only Had A Brain caught my attention: one is an elegantly written response challenging some aspects of my argument and the other a screechy attack.
In the first response, Marcia Ford agrees with my statements about “bogus credentials,” but defends the credential offered by the American Association of [...]
Tags: Advice · Clients · Grants · Questions
Credentials for Grant Writers—If I Only Had A Brain
February 1st, 2008 · 4 Comments
A manager at the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles, an agency we sometimes work for, recently sent me a link to the Grant Professionals Certification Institute (GPCI), an organization that offers “credentials” for would-be grant writers. He wanted my reaction to the idea of grant writing credentials, which I gave [...]
Tags: Advice · Grants · Questions
Studio Executives, Starlets, and Funding
December 6th, 2007 · No Comments
In William Goldman’s hilarious Adventures in the Screen Trade*, he wrote, “Nobody knows anything.” Nobody knows how much money a movie will make or which movies should be made or what audiences want. Goldman cites movies a studio thought were a sure thing and flopped, and movies every studio but one rejected, only to see [...]