The National Endowment for the Arts (or “NEA”, for short) is the Federal funding agency for arts and culture organizations in the United States. They have several grant opportunities each year and most arts nonprofits usually want a piece of that pie. Of course, whether or not you actually get a piece depends on…
All grant proposals are different. Some have strict requirements and lengthy lists of questions. Others ask very few questions and don’t require much in the way of hard metrics. But regardless of what type of proposals you may be working on at this moment in time, there is one thing I can say with certainty:…
Writing With a Mission is available for purchase on Amazon now! Bruce Ripley and I are so excited to announce that after many months of writing, editing, and dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, our third book has gone on sale TODAY. Writing With a Mission: How to Create a Successful Career as a…
My new book, Writing With a Mission: How to Create a Successful Career as a Grant Writer” will be available in just a few short days (September 9th). This book is the book that Bruce (my co-author) and I wish we had when we were at the beginning of our careers as grant writers and…
This past March, COVID-19 shut down much of the country and arts and culture organizations with it since you can’t really fill concert halls, theaters, museums, and classrooms without putting your patrons (and staff) at risk. But now it’s August, and rather than seeing the improvement and steady re-opening that many of us originally…
During the Coronavirus quarantine, I’ve lost track of how many Skype calls and Zoom webinars I’ve participated in, but let’s just say it’s a lot. Some have been client calls. Some have been calls with colleagues. And some have been webinars from grantmakers and other grant pros. The latter calls have actually been the…
Candid’s Foundation Directory Online (often called ‘FDO’, for short) is one of the many available options for conducting online grants research and creating a grant strategy. However, in order to use it you must have a subscription and that, of course, costs money. So I often hear from many of my readers and subscribers…
I had planned to write this blog post on becoming a grant consultant long before the COVID-19 crisis hit, but now this topic seems even more timely than it did a month ago. Last year my business partner, Bruce Ripley, and I wrote the book Granted: How to Break Into Freelance Grant Writing and…
Things are incredibly strange and scary right now. Everything seems uncertain, our routines, have been upended, and on top of it all most of us are worried about the wellbeing of our organizations as well. As you probably know, most of my clients and readers come from nonprofits in the arts and culture…
Reading and sifting through the information in 990s is a big part of grant writing (or at least, it should be). But most of us aren’t born with the innate ability, let alone the willpower, to read and interpret long tax forms and locate the information that might be useful for grant seeking. Never…