Grant Writing Confidential

I’m working on a HUD Healthy Homes proposal, and sections b and c of “Rating Factor 1: Capacity of the Applicant and Relevant Organizational Experience” requires responses to these sentences: Relevant Organization Experience (6 points). Describe your recent, relevant, and successfully demonstrated experience in undertaking eligible program activities. and: Past Performance of the Organization (6 [...]

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A recent commenter told us, “You should write a book, if you haven’t already.” We’ve thought idly about doing a book and then gone back to drinking Aviations, admiring the sunset, and writing proposals. But we might eventually write a book if the conditions are right. The main reason I haven’t spent a lot of [...]

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Joanne Fritz of About.com’s nonprofit blog is hosting this month’s blog carnival and wants to know your “2011 resolutions.” Our resolutions are easy: we don’t have any because we don’t need them. We’re going to keep writing complete, technically correct proposals that we submit on time for our clients. That’s it. Our clients hire us [...]

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We mentioned “the laugh test” in “So, How Much Grant Money Should I Ask For? And Who’s the Competition?” Whenever you’re asking for money, you shouldn’t request a wildly implausible amount. If your organization has a $100,000 budget and you ask a foundation for $10M, you’ve failed the laugh test. As we said in “When [...]

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Ed Nelson asks, “Do conservative non-profits get grants or are federal grants such an anathema to them, [and] they choose not to apply?” I want to answer, but the question itself feels wrong because politics shouldn’t be an issue in human service delivery. Politics and political views matter in Congress, which decides what kinds of [...]

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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 [...]

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For KU basketball fans, the unthinkable happened yesterday. Our beloved Jayhawks, pre-season Number One and end-of-season Number One in the polls, winner of the Big 12 regular season and tournament and picked by the Bracketologist-in-Chief, President Obama, to win the NCAA championship, lost in the second round to the University of Northern Iowa (UNI). Despite [...]

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Faithful readers will know that I’m very fond of what used to be called “B movies,” so it should be no surprise that I also love movie trailers. The otherwise forgettable 1998 remake of Godzilla featured one of the best theatrical trailers I’ve ever seen: old guys are fishing off a East River pier in [...]

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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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After almost 17 years in business, I thought I had been asked every possible question about grant writing and our services, almost all of which are answered on our web page or in one of our 115 blog posts. As a result, most initial phone calls are fairly routine. So I was rendered almost speechless—a [...]

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