Category Archives: grants

Grant Writers Must Know Their Limits

A freelance grant writer needs to develop a specialty area. It’s all well and good to say that you can write any kind of grant, but it’s not really true. I’ve taken on two grants over the past five years that were out of my area of expertise; these were medical grants. The Doctor who directs the clinic was pleased with my services and my writing. But I did not feel comfortable about the end products because the terminology, concepts, equipment, and processes of a clinic were so foreign to me that I struggled to put it together.

I learned that I just can’t write all grants for all people. Everyone has their field of knowledge and mine is definitely not the fine points of optical evaluation equipment. My Masters is in administration so I know management and change process well, but I am weak in designing programs for diabetic immigrant farm workers.

Freelance grant writers with the highest degree of success stay within their field of knowledge. The reason most organizations hire a writer isn’t because there’s no staff member with the ability to write a grant (most non-profit leaders have done plenty of grant writing). The reason organizations hire a grant writer is to give the job of writing to someone else. A shallow knowledge base in the area you are writing for will cause problems because the staff simply won’t have the time to bring you up-to-speed. Let’s face it, if they had the time to write it, they’d write it.

I suggest you find grants which your training and experience give you in-depth knowledge about and write those. If there are enough grants in that area to make a living, you’ll do fine. Don’t define yourself too narrowly and rely on one grant program either, or you may end up quite narrow (hungry) yourself!

Does anyone else have a comment about writing outside your area of expertise?

Related Posts:

Grant Writing – A Romantic Misconception
Lessons Learned from Failure

Grant Writers Must Know Their Limits

A freelance grant writer needs to develop a specialty area. It’s all well and good to say that you can write any kind of grant, but it’s not really true. I’ve taken on two grants over the past five years that were out of my area of expertise; these were medical grants. The Doctor who directs the clinic was pleased with my services and my writing. But I did not feel comfortable about the end products because the terminology, concepts, equipment, and processes of a clinic were so foreign to me that I struggled to put it together.

I learned that I just can’t write all grants for all people. Everyone has their field of knowledge and mine is definitely not the fine points of optical evaluation equipment. My Masters is in administration so I know management and change process well, but I am weak in designing programs for diabetic immigrant farm workers.

Freelance grant writers with the highest degree of success stay within their field of knowledge. The reason most organizations hire a writer isn’t because there’s no staff member with the ability to write a grant (most non-profit leaders have done plenty of grant writing). The reason organizations hire a grant writer is to give the job of writing to someone else. A shallow knowledge base in the area you are writing for will cause problems because the staff simply won’t have the time to bring you up-to-speed. Let’s face it, if they had the time to write it, they’d write it.

I suggest you find grants which your training and experience give you in-depth knowledge about and write those. If there are enough grants in that area to make a living, you’ll do fine. Don’t define yourself too narrowly and rely on one grant program either, or you may end up quite narrow (hungry) yourself!

Does anyone else have a comment about writing outside your area of expertise?

Related Posts:

Grant Writing – A Romantic Misconception
Lessons Learned from Failure

Published by Creative Resources & Research http://grantgoddess.com

Grant Writing is Like Lasagna

Lasagna is one of my favorite Italian foods – it’s the complete package, if you make it right, that is. A good lasagna has layers of perfectly cooked pasta, tomato sauce, Italian sausage, ricotta cheese, mozzarella cheese, parmesan cheese, and I even like to add a little cheddar cheese. Of course, it’s layered several times with all this good stuff!

Now a good grant is similar to a good lasagna! That’s right people, it really is! You have to write a grant in layers, like making nice lasagna. There’s the needs section (layer), the program design section (layer), the project management section (layer), the sustainability section (layer), the evaluation section (layer). And while each section/layer is distinct – like the sausage and the sauce of my favorite lasagna – there’s also a little bit of intermixing of ingredients/repeating of information.

That’s right! You can write a needs section and never mention it again but you will end up with an inferior lasagna…er, grant. You need to repeat the layers, when it’s appropriate. If the needs you describe are met by the project design – as they must be – then a mention of the needs layer is warranted in the project design layer to reinforce the deliciousness of the design.

A good lasagna would be incomplete with only one set of layers. It takes multiple layers to make a first class lasagna and repeating salient/savory points of the grant sections/layers make a grant come together like a good lasagna.

In example, if you say in your needs section that you have a waiting list o 30 parents for a particular program, then you want to point out that the parenting program you are proposing to implement in response to the need will accommodate all 30 parents on the waiting list and maybe even a few more! Abundanza, you have sausage in the first layer, and even more sausage in the second layer! TASTY!

So write your grant like a lasagna, write it in the layers specified in the RFA and then make sure you repeat the most delicious parts of the layers so that your lasagna is complete and not a single layered impostor that nobody will want to eat; and if they do, one they won’t give a 5 star rating.

By: Derek Link, Non-profit Consultant and Expert Grant Writer
———————-
 
If you’re interested in more of Derek Link’s obsession with how grant writing is like food, try some of these other posts:
 
Grants Are Like Box Lunches
 
Grants Are Like Sausage
 
Some Grants Are Like Peanut Butter
 
Grants Are Like Donuts
 

Grant Writing is Like Lasagna

Lasagna is one of my favorite Italian foods – it’s the complete package, if you make it right, that is. A good lasagna has layers of perfectly cooked pasta, tomato sauce, Italian sausage, ricotta cheese, mozzarella cheese, parmesan cheese, and I even like to add a little cheddar cheese. Of course, it’s layered several times with all this good stuff!

Now a good grant is similar to a good lasagna! That’s right people, it really is! You have to write a grant in layers, like making nice lasagna. There’s the needs section (layer), the program design section (layer), the project management section (layer), the sustainability section (layer), the evaluation section (layer). And while each section/layer is distinct – like the sausage and the sauce of my favorite lasagna – there’s also a little bit of intermixing of ingredients/repeating of information.

That’s right! You can write a needs section and never mention it again but you will end up with an inferior lasagna…er, grant. You need to repeat the layers, when it’s appropriate. If the needs you describe are met by the project design – as they must be – then a mention of the needs layer is warranted in the project design layer to reinforce the deliciousness of the design.

A good lasagna would be incomplete with only one set of layers. It takes multiple layers to make a first class lasagna and repeating salient/savory points of the grant sections/layers make a grant come together like a good lasagna.

In example, if you say in your needs section that you have a waiting list o 30 parents for a particular program, then you want to point out that the parenting program you are proposing to implement in response to the need will accommodate all 30 parents on the waiting list and maybe even a few more! Abundanza, you have sausage in the first layer, and even more sausage in the second layer! TASTY!

So write your grant like a lasagna, write it in the layers specified in the RFA and then make sure you repeat the most delicious parts of the layers so that your lasagna is complete and not a single layered impostor that nobody will want to eat; and if they do, one they won’t give a 5 star rating.

By: Derek Link, Non-profit Consultant and Expert Grant Writer
———————-
 
If you’re interested in more of Derek Link’s obsession with how grant writing is like food, try some of these other posts:
 
Grants Are Like Box Lunches
 
Grants Are Like Sausage
 
Some Grants Are Like Peanut Butter
 
Grants Are Like Donuts
 

Published by Creative Resources & Research http://grantgoddess.com

Grant Writing Success – A Numbers Game?

It is not easy to explain all of the factors involved in grant writing success. Certainly, experience and skill have a lot to do with it, but there’s much more to it than that. In many ways, it’s a numbers game.

First, there are the odds of how likely you are to get funded given the total amount of money to be awarded, the total number of grants to be awarded, and the number of grant proposals likely to be submitted. So, you combine these odds with your skill and experience and that should take you to grant writing success, right?

Not so fast.

You still have to deal with the vicissitudes of the readers. In a government grant competition, you will likely have three readers and scoring criteria that add up to 100 possible points awarded per reader. Hopefully, the readers will be carefully trained and will thoroughly understand the scoring criteria and how points should be allocated. Even in this ideal situation, there can still be dramatic differences in the points allocated by the different readers. In some competitions, the readers are required to conference with each other and bring their scores within a certain distance of each other, but sometimes the readers score independently and all three scores are averaged. This is how it’s possible to get scores of 100, 98, and 85, knocking your proposal out of the funding range. It shouldn’t be possible, but it is.

And the more extreme the competition is (see my discussion of the odds, above), the higher your score needs to be in order to be funded, which means that you need all three readers to award you exceptionally high scores if you hope to be funded.

Even then, it’s no guarantee. In a recent grant competition I received scores of 100, 98, and 96, and our proposal still was not funded. When I looked back at the readers written comments, there were no suggestions for improvement. It kind of makes you think that the whole grant award process is more random than you thought, doesn’t it?

Regardless of the odds and the biases of the readers, experience and skill still play the biggest roles in the grant award process. In the example I just gave you, as frustrating as it was to have submitted an excellent proposal that was not funded, the truth is that if it had not been an excellent proposal it would’ve had absolutely no chance of being funded. In that particular competition, only the absolute best, near-perfect proposals had a chance at being funded. While it may seem random, it’s not.

Submitting a well-written, high-quality proposal is still the best way to negotiate the maze of the numbers game and reach the goal of grant writing success.

—————————-

Would you like to improve your grant writing skills?  Want to learn to be a great writer?  Try our Grant Writing 101 online course.  Learn at your own pace when it’s convenient for you.

Published by Creative Resources & Research http://grantgoddess.com

Grant Writing Success – A Numbers Game?

It is not easy to explain all of the factors involved in grant writing success. Certainly, experience and skill have a lot to do with it, but there’s much more to it than that. In many ways, it’s a numbers game.

First, there are the odds of how likely you are to get funded given the total amount of money to be awarded, the total number of grants to be awarded, and the number of grant proposals likely to be submitted. So, you combine these odds with your skill and experience and that should take you to grant writing success, right?

Not so fast.

You still have to deal with the vicissitudes of the readers. In a government grant competition, you will likely have three readers and scoring criteria that add up to 100 possible points awarded per reader. Hopefully, the readers will be carefully trained and will thoroughly understand the scoring criteria and how points should be allocated. Even in this ideal situation, there can still be dramatic differences in the points allocated by the different readers. In some competitions, the readers are required to conference with each other and bring their scores within a certain distance of each other, but sometimes the readers score independently and all three scores are averaged. This is how it’s possible to get scores of 100, 98, and 85, knocking your proposal out of the funding range. It shouldn’t be possible, but it is.

And the more extreme the competition is (see my discussion of the odds, above), the higher your score needs to be in order to be funded, which means that you need all three readers to award you exceptionally high scores if you hope to be funded.

Even then, it’s no guarantee. In a recent grant competition I received scores of 100, 98, and 96, and our proposal still was not funded. When I looked back at the readers written comments, there were no suggestions for improvement. It kind of makes you think that the whole grant award process is more random than you thought, doesn’t it?

Regardless of the odds and the biases of the readers, experience and skill still play the biggest roles in the grant award process. In the example I just gave you, as frustrating as it was to have submitted an excellent proposal that was not funded, the truth is that if it had not been an excellent proposal it would’ve had absolutely no chance of being funded. In that particular competition, only the absolute best, near-perfect proposals had a chance at being funded. While it may seem random, it’s not.

Submitting a well-written, high-quality proposal is still the best way to negotiate the maze of the numbers game and reach the goal of grant writing success.

—————————-

Would you like to improve your grant writing skills?  Want to learn to be a great writer?  Try our Grant Writing 101 online course.  Learn at your own pace when it’s convenient for you.

Four Grant Writing Ethical No-No’s

There are actually many ethical issues involved in grant writing, many more than I expected when I first began my journey as a professional grant writer. Here are four of the most common ethical issues you need to avoid if you are a professional grant writer:

  1. Lying in a proposal.  I have to admit that I have always assumed that everyone would know that lying in a grant proposal is ethically wrong, but you’d be surprised how many times I have heard people try to justify it. Don’t try to exaggerate your need for the grant or include program activities that you don’t intend on implementing. Just tell the truth.
  2. Reusing narrative written for another client. It’s very tempting, especially when you’re overworked and tired, to just lift some narrative that you wrote for another client for the same grant last year to put in someone else’s narrative this year. Don’t do it.  If you get caught (especially by a reader scoring the grant), you risk not being funded, but it’s just plain wrong anyway. If you are being paid for original narrative, write original narrative.  If you can’t think of another way to say what you need to say, don’t take the job.
  3. Poaching funding sources.  I heard this horror story when I met with a local non-profit administrator last week. A private funding source had invited the non-profit to submit a proposal.  This particular funding source does not accept unsolicited proposals.  The non-profit asked its grant writer (an outside consultant) to write a proposal to this funding source.  The grant writer wrote a proposal and submitted it. A couple of weeks later, the non-profit administrator got a phone call from the funding source saying that the grant writer had actually submitted several proposals – the one the funding source had requested as well as proposals on behalf of several other organizations the grant writer worked with.  None of these other proposals were part of the solicitation.  The grant writer had just taken it on herself to try to squeeze in some of her other clients in competition with the client making the original request.  I’m sure she assumed they would not know or find out.  To make matters worse, the representative from the funding source told the non-profit administrator that of the several proposals submitted by that grant writer, the weakest one from from the original agency requesting the work. The non-profit organization that originally asked the grant writer to submit the proposal was ultimately not funded.
  4. Telling a client that they can pay for grant writing services out of the grant when they can’t. There is some debate in the field about whether charging a contingency fee for grant writing services is ethical or not.  Some people insist that contingency fees are unethical, but then call it a “bonus” for getting funded and call that ethical. The real issue, though, is not whether or not it’s a contingency fee, but where that fee comes from. If you tell someone they can pay the fee out of the grant when they can’t, you have essentially lied to them. Very few funding sources allow you to pay for grant writing services out of a grant itself (there are, however, some that do). 

The bottom line is that integrity matters. Trying to cut ethical corners may seem like a profitable decision at the time, but in the end it is not the way to build a successful grant writing career.

————————————-

Do you really need a grant writer? Download this article to help you decide.

Free e-book – Using Social Media to Increase Your Business

Secrets of Successful Grant Writers online seminar..

Published by Creative Resources & Research http://grantgoddess.com

Four Grant Writing Ethical No-No’s

There are actually many ethical issues involved in grant writing, many more than I expected when I first began my journey as a professional grant writer. Here are four of the most common ethical issues you need to avoid if you are a professional grant writer:

  1. Lying in a proposal.  I have to admit that I have always assumed that everyone would know that lying in a grant proposal is ethically wrong, but you’d be surprised how many times I have heard people try to justify it. Don’t try to exaggerate your need for the grant or include program activities that you don’t intend on implementing. Just tell the truth.
  2. Reusing narrative written for another client. It’s very tempting, especially when you’re overworked and tired, to just lift some narrative that you wrote for another client for the same grant last year to put in someone else’s narrative this year. Don’t do it.  If you get caught (especially by a reader scoring the grant), you risk not being funded, but it’s just plain wrong anyway. If you are being paid for original narrative, write original narrative.  If you can’t think of another way to say what you need to say, don’t take the job.
  3. Poaching funding sources.  I heard this horror story when I met with a local non-profit administrator last week. A private funding source had invited the non-profit to submit a proposal.  This particular funding source does not accept unsolicited proposals.  The non-profit asked its grant writer (an outside consultant) to write a proposal to this funding source.  The grant writer wrote a proposal and submitted it. A couple of weeks later, the non-profit administrator got a phone call from the funding source saying that the grant writer had actually submitted several proposals – the one the funding source had requested as well as proposals on behalf of several other organizations the grant writer worked with.  None of these other proposals were part of the solicitation.  The grant writer had just taken it on herself to try to squeeze in some of her other clients in competition with the client making the original request.  I’m sure she assumed they would not know or find out.  To make matters worse, the representative from the funding source told the non-profit administrator that of the several proposals submitted by that grant writer, the weakest one from from the original agency requesting the work. The non-profit organization that originally asked the grant writer to submit the proposal was ultimately not funded.
  4. Telling a client that they can pay for grant writing services out of the grant when they can’t. There is some debate in the field about whether charging a contingency fee for grant writing services is ethical or not.  Some people insist that contingency fees are unethical, but then call it a “bonus” for getting funded and call that ethical. The real issue, though, is not whether or not it’s a contingency fee, but where that fee comes from. If you tell someone they can pay the fee out of the grant when they can’t, you have essentially lied to them. Very few funding sources allow you to pay for grant writing services out of a grant itself (there are, however, some that do). 

The bottom line is that integrity matters. Trying to cut ethical corners may seem like a profitable decision at the time, but in the end it is not the way to build a successful grant writing career.

————————————-

Do you really need a grant writer? Download this article to help you decide.

Free e-book – Using Social Media to Increase Your Business

Secrets of Successful Grant Writers online seminar..

Federal Government Grant Priorities…..Whose Priorities?

I was scanning the grant opportunities at grants.gov this morning, and I noticed something that I have noticed for years, but today it struck me a bit differently. I’m accustomed to seeing hundreds of grant opportunities that don’t apply to my clients.  Many are amusing (I’ve posted on Facebook about competitions for funds to save particular obscure animal species, etc.) and some are just incomprehensible. However, at a time when our economy is in trouble and people are suffering, some of the federal grant priorities seem just wrong.

Non-profit organizations that are often the last line of support for our most needy citizens are struggling for every dime these days, yet here are just a few of the hundreds of things that the government is choosing to fund instead:

Inventory of Cave Dwelling Animals in Wet Caves Grant – I think we could just go with last year’s inventory numbers, don’t you?

Azerbaijan New Media Project – This is $4,000,000 to support the development of new media and online communities in Azerbaijan. Supposedly it will help with the distribution of US aide there.

Establishing a Global System of Regional Wildlife Networks: Providing Support for Central American Wildlife – Wildlife here are so well protected that we have extra cash to be protecting wildlife in Central America?

Mexican Spotted Owl Grant – This announcement lists only “Mexican Spotted Owl” in the full description of the project.  Are we buying a Mexican spotted owl?  Several? Are we protecting it? Feeding it? Whatever we are doing to it, is it more important than $280,000 worth of food for the homeless?

Youth Empowerment Program in Kenya – $14,000,000 for this one, folks. I guess all of the youth in the US are empowered and well-educated, so it’s time to move on the youth of Kenya.

Decentralization Enabling Environment – I find this one to be particularly ironic. This grant provides $2,000,000 to a nongovernmental agency in Honduras to help develop the “environment necessary for decentralization of government services to the local level in order to better respond to citizen needs.” At a time when local organizations in the U.S. that do this very thing are suffering and the U.S. is going through a dramatic centralization of services and resources, we’re giving money to another country to do the opposite.

MERIDA Small Grant Program for Community Youth at Risk – This one is for community-based programs for at-risk youth in Panama. See my comment above about the Youth Empowerment Program in Kenya.

Please don’t misunderstand.  I am sure that there is some value in each of these programs. What kind of human being would I be if I didn’t think doing something to or with Mexican Spotted Owls was important or that we shouldn’t have an accurate inventory of wet cave dwelling animals?

Even so, I think we need to do a much better job of prioritizing.  Every family knows that you can’t have everything. Some things that you think are important have to be put aside or postponed until you can afford them in favor of funding things that are much more important.

As for the grants I just cited (and the hundreds of others like them), just whose priorities are those, anyway?

—————————————-

Click here to access two free webinars on the Basics of Program Evaluation.

Published by Creative Resources & Research http://grantgoddess.com

Federal Government Grant Priorities…..Whose Priorities?

I was scanning the grant opportunities at grants.gov this morning, and I noticed something that I have noticed for years, but today it struck me a bit differently. I’m accustomed to seeing hundreds of grant opportunities that don’t apply to my clients.  Many are amusing (I’ve posted on Facebook about competitions for funds to save particular obscure animal species, etc.) and some are just incomprehensible. However, at a time when our economy is in trouble and people are suffering, some of the federal grant priorities seem just wrong.

Non-profit organizations that are often the last line of support for our most needy citizens are struggling for every dime these days, yet here are just a few of the hundreds of things that the government is choosing to fund instead:

Inventory of Cave Dwelling Animals in Wet Caves Grant – I think we could just go with last year’s inventory numbers, don’t you?

Azerbaijan New Media Project – This is $4,000,000 to support the development of new media and online communities in Azerbaijan. Supposedly it will help with the distribution of US aide there.

Establishing a Global System of Regional Wildlife Networks: Providing Support for Central American Wildlife – Wildlife here are so well protected that we have extra cash to be protecting wildlife in Central America?

Mexican Spotted Owl Grant – This announcement lists only “Mexican Spotted Owl” in the full description of the project.  Are we buying a Mexican spotted owl?  Several? Are we protecting it? Feeding it? Whatever we are doing to it, is it more important than $280,000 worth of food for the homeless?

Youth Empowerment Program in Kenya – $14,000,000 for this one, folks. I guess all of the youth in the US are empowered and well-educated, so it’s time to move on the youth of Kenya.

Decentralization Enabling Environment – I find this one to be particularly ironic. This grant provides $2,000,000 to a nongovernmental agency in Honduras to help develop the “environment necessary for decentralization of government services to the local level in order to better respond to citizen needs.” At a time when local organizations in the U.S. that do this very thing are suffering and the U.S. is going through a dramatic centralization of services and resources, we’re giving money to another country to do the opposite.

MERIDA Small Grant Program for Community Youth at Risk – This one is for community-based programs for at-risk youth in Panama. See my comment above about the Youth Empowerment Program in Kenya.

Please don’t misunderstand.  I am sure that there is some value in each of these programs. What kind of human being would I be if I didn’t think doing something to or with Mexican Spotted Owls was important or that we shouldn’t have an accurate inventory of wet cave dwelling animals?

Even so, I think we need to do a much better job of prioritizing.  Every family knows that you can’t have everything. Some things that you think are important have to be put aside or postponed until you can afford them in favor of funding things that are much more important.

As for the grants I just cited (and the hundreds of others like them), just whose priorities are those, anyway?

—————————————-

Click here to access two free webinars on the Basics of Program Evaluation.