Don't Let Grants Stress You Out
Shark Week’s thirtieth anniversary on the Discovery Channel was completed in 2018 from July 22-29. In 2016, I wrote about Shark Week and Serving on a Nonprofit Board. This year, I want to revisit Shark Week and show some grantitude for all my fellow grant professionals. Sharks continue to fascinate me, and I think they are beautiful, magical creatures, although I wouldn’t swim with them…
“What are its chances?” “Do you think it has a chance?” I was asked these questions recently at the end of an intense, compressed application process for a competitive state grant. Undoubtedly, these questions are ruminating in grant team members’ minds often; whether or not, or how, they express them. This particular application involved a request for $500,000 and required 70 hours of…
Are you new to grant writing? Are you considering a career as a grant professional? Are you a board member interested in learning more about grants so that you can help your organization? I wanted to put some of our key “basic” information about getting started and some definitions of industry jargon in one place for you. If you’re still looking for more, you can…
Grant Writer (#LifeasaGrantWriter) versus Grant Pro or Grant Professional (#LifeasaGrantPro)…what is the difference you might ask? Both are chronicling the daily office lives and downtime/self-care of grant writers and grant professionals. It comes back to the big title debate in our field…Grant Writer or Grant Professional? One generalization about the choice between the titles is that those who identify their career as that of a…
When you are out and about on life adventures or even day to day excursions, there are often relatable lessons to our professional work – in the case of zip lining with friends, I walked away with fun analogies about grant writing best practices. I’ve had some thoughtful moments about grants when out digging for clams along the coast of Maine and some deep personal…
We are a few days past the halfway mark for the calendar year, so I stopped to assess some of the metrics our team looks at when doing planning for the next quarter compared to our goals – client success percentage, dollars awarded to clients, the number of blog post hits and shares, etc. When in the midst of so many competing grant deadlines, and…
School Safety Grants and our Souls: Where do we go from here? “Does it ever give thee pause, that people used to have a soul—not by hearsay alone, or as a figure of speech; but as a truth that they knew, and acted upon! Verily it was another world then…but yet it is a pity we have lost the tidings of our souls…we shall have…
**Did you miss Part 1 of 2 for this post? You can catch up on Attachments Are Not an Afterthought (Part 1) here.** Last week we highlighted the importance of addressing required attachments as the beginning of the grant writing process, not at the end. We explored work plans, resumes, cost estimates, and architectural and engineering plans. Here are some more attachments that you may…
Many grant applications require attachments in addition to the narrative and budget components. It can be easy to overlook addressing the attachments when faced with larger, more pressing tasks of developing a program and writing a lengthy narrative. However, the attachments often help inform – not just substantiate – the application’s narrative and budget. Additionally, some attachments take time to collect or complete. When planning…
“How much time does it take to write a grant?” is one of the most common questions asked by those new to the field of grant seeking, by board members new to working with grant-funded organizations, and by nonprofit leaders trying to plan realistic timelines and workloads. The honest answer is: it really depends. Grants can take anywhere from 5 hours for a small private…