Grant Writing Confidential

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 might [...]

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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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It seems that the Bard is always topical, and All’s Well That Ends Well, one of Shakespeare’s “problem comedies” that may actually be a tragedy, comes to mind as an apropos title for a comedic tale that illustrates one of the many odd aspects of grant writing: why there is little reason to read comments [...]

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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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A budding grant writer who is enrolled in a Nonprofit Management Masters program recently e-mailed me to ask if she should spend $4,000 on grant writing classes. Regular readers know how little I think of grant writing training, so I advised her to take some undergrad courses in English composition/journalism and spend her $4k on [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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