Picture this: the grant deadline is in 48 hours. Your heart is racing, your inbox is a graveyard of unanswered pleas, and you’re still waiting on a budget breakdown, an updated program description, and that one elusive staff bio written in something resembling human English. Sound familiar? If you’ve been in the grant-writing game for…
Trying to write while the program is still being invented is like building a house on quicksand. The more you write, the deeper you sink—and the more rewrites you’re guaranteed to suffer through.
Being the sole grant writer in an organization can feel overwhelming—you’re often expected to be a strategist, writer, researcher, and administrator all at once.
Let’s kill the fantasy: Work-life balance doesn’t exist in high-stakes environments. Not really. Not when there’s a million-dollar deadline on Friday and your inbox is a dumpster fire.
Let’s get one thing straight: multitasking is a myth. You’re not a computer, and even if you were, too many open tabs still crash the system.
Funder priorities shift like sand in a windstorm. Blink, and you’ll miss the latest trend. But chasing them with clunky systems and boring meetings? That’s a losing strategy.
You will get bored with your communications long before your audience remembers you.
While I have not seen formal research on where a person’s eye travels when they first read a grant proposal, I paid attention to my habits and have generalized them to assist our clients. Ironically, if you understand how to speed read, you will also have clues about how to position your information so that…
As a political scientist, I have always been fascinated by the biographies of charismatic leaders like John Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, and Mahatma Gandhi. As I studied their speeches and other communications I began to note certain common themes that gave their communications greater urgency, effectiveness, and persuasive power. I will share one of their most…
Now the presidential election is heating up, I find myself interested in the little tricks used by political consultants to influence voters. As a grant writer, I have applied a lot of their ideas to benefit the clients we serve at Drew & Associates. Some of the political consultants’ best ideas are the result of…