Grant Writing Confidential

You might think that, given our tendency to mock various scams and time wasters in the grant world (see, for example, here and here), people would stop sending us spam with outlandish promises in it. Alas, that’s not the case, since we recently received a message from Jacqueline Ruth Turco of “Aimfar,” which says, “Let [...]

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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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Like Spartacus in the eponymous movie*, we’ve been toiling in the grant salt mines for over 16 years. Over that time, about two-thirds of our clients have been nonprofits, while the rest are a mix of public agencies and—in a recent change due to the Stimulus Bill—for-profit businesses. The popular imagination thinks that all nonprofits [...]

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I’ve noticed a not-too-subtle change in RFPs lately—largely, I think, due to the Stimulus Bill—that requires us to drag out our trusty Crystal Ball, which is an essential tool of grant writing. Like Bullwinkle J. Moose, we gaze into our Crystal Ball and say,”Eenie meenie chili beanie, the spirits are about to speak,” as we [...]

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After reading the first draft of “One of the Open Secrets of Grant Writing and Grant Writers: Reading,” I suggested that Jake lay down for a while, as he seemed to have worked himself into a frenzy over the subject of no reading versus some reading versus close reading versus . . . well, [...]

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The Stimulus Bill deluge has begun, and we’ve been getting lots of calls from for-profit companies interested in Department of Energy “Funding Opportunity Announcements” (FOA is DOE-speak for RFP). Usually the caller will say something along the lines of, “So, how many funded proposals for Dilithium Crystal research have you written?” This leads me to [...]

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I thought that I wouldn’t have to write any more posts on the Stimulus Bill, but like Michael Corleone in The Godfather: Part III, “Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in.” The curious way the Commonwealth of Virginia has decided to solicit ideas for how to spend its piece of [...]

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Jake received an email response to “FEMA and Grants.gov Together at Last” from a firefighter who is working on a Assistance to Firefighters (AFG) proposal who seems to have been given a bum steer by AFG Program Officer and Jake’s nemesis, Tom Harrington (for background, see “FEMA Tardiness, Grants.gov, and Dealing with Recalcitrant Bureaucrats” and [...]

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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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A client recently said that she was moved by a description Isaac wrote of her target area in the needs assessment of her proposal, but she asked if we could make it more hopeful. Isaac strongly discouraged her—not as a way of disparaging her neighborhood, but because describing an area as terribly depressed makes the [...]

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