Lightning Fast Grant Writing

MAY 8, 2025

If youre a grant writer, chances are youre dancing on a tightrope between multiple deadlines, department demands, and the constant pressure to perform. Welcome to the circus. Lets get one thing straight: multitasking is a myth. Youre not a computer, and even if you were, too many open tabs still crash the system. What works? Ruthless prioritization.

Calendar

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

MAY 12, 2025

Renewal Anxiety Is RealHeres How to Fight Back Like a Pro You know that sinking feeling: a long-time funder suddenly mentions they’re re-evaluating priorities. Cue the cold sweat. Renewal anxiety is no jokeand for experienced grant writers, it can feel like a thundercloud hanging over every funding cycle. But panic wont pay the bills. Action will.

Grants

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

MAY 12, 2025

Lets face itbeing an experienced grant writer can feel like youre juggling flaming swords while walking a tightrope… in a windstorm… during tax season. Sure, youve got the expertise. You know how to make funders swoon with a perfectly phrased needs statement and turn complex program logic into pure poetry. But youre also exhausted, constantly chasing core operating support, wrangling impossible deadlines, mentoring green writers, and navigating post-award red tape that never seems to

Grant

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

MAY 12, 2025

You did it. The application is submitted, the grants been awarded, and everyones celebrating. Cue the confetti! But wait whats that creeping over the horizon? Oh, just the real work a.k.a. post-award requirements. You know, the part no one talks about during the happy dance. Reporting deadlines. Budget tracking. Compliance checks. Progress updates. Logic models.

Award

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

MAY 9, 2025

Picture this: the grant deadline is in 48 hours. Your heart is racing, your inbox is a graveyard of unanswered pleas, and youre 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 more than five minutes, you already know the real bottleneck isnt your writing skills.

Grant Writing

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

MAY 12, 2025

Every grant writer knows the feeling: deadlines loom, your program narratives are tight, your outcomes are crystal clearand yet, youre still stuck trying to fund the electricity bill, staff salaries, and that squeaky office chair no one wants to admit they broke. Why? Because core operating supportthe golden goose of grant fundingis maddeningly hard to secure.

Grant Writing

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

MAY 9, 2025

If youve ever cracked open a federal NOFO and felt your soul try to leave your body, youre not alone. Even seasoned grant pros groan at the thought of wrestling with a 40-page RFP, cross-checking 19 different attachments, and chasing signatures like its an Olympic sport. Federal proposals arent just bigtheyre massive , bureaucratic, and jammed with technical landmines.

Federal Grants

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

MAY 8, 2025

The Absolute Worst Way to Stay Updated Lets cut through the nonsense. Too many grant writers waste their lives glued to pointless webinars, fumbling through endless newsletters, orworse of allattending meetings where program officers drone on like its their job to bore you. And peer networks? Please. No ones giving away the good stuff in a casual Slack channel or over stale bagels at a conference.

Burnout

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

MAY 8, 2025

Lets face it: grant writing isnt just typing proposals and hitting submit. Its high-stakes, high-pressure intellectual combat. Youre racing deadlines, juggling demands, navigating rejection, and still expected to bring in the money like its your superpower. No wonder burnout hits so many smart, capable, hardworking professionals. But heres the good news: you can beat burnout without giving up your edge.

Burnout

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

MAY 9, 2025

Lets be real: grant rejection sucks. It doesnt matter how long youve been in the gameseeing your carefully crafted proposal get shot down still stings. You poured hours (maybe days) into aligning with the funders goals, crafting the perfect narrative, collecting data, and double-checking every attachment. And then bam you get the dreaded Thank you for your submission email.

Proposal

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

AUGUST 4, 2025

[NOTE: This is the start of a new seven-part series of blog posts based on Dr. Drew’s answers to the  most urgent questions  time-strapped executive directors are likely to ask about leveraging  ChatGPT to improve their grant writing.] ChatGPT can save you time on grant writing—it can accelerate your grant writing process. To be sure, it will work best if you are already really smart and well-trained.

ChatGPT

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

SEPTEMBER 30, 2024

LAGUNA NIGUEL, CA – How often do you need to repeat your message? A lot… One of the most sobering things about running a non-profit charity is to realize how hard it is to get out the charity’s name and message. Large corporations manage to buy visibility for their brands by purchasing large print ads, riveting video ads, and radio spots.

Management

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

JULY 21, 2024

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 eye-tracking experiments. The question is how can we apply these ideas to improving a proposal cover letter?

Letter Of Inquiry

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

JULY 21, 2024

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 compelling techniques in this article: They keep things simple.

Grant Writing

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

JULY 21, 2024

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 it has the most dramatic impact on the reader.

Application

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

JANUARY 10, 2024

Parallel to the improvisation you do yourself as a grant writer, it is also important to know tools for helping your grant writing team improvise as well. Too often a lack of creative energy can be traced to the fact that various team members may be afraid of failing. With this motivation, they may be more creative in inventing reasons for giving up than coming up with solutions that will make it happen.

Grant Writing

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

JANUARY 10, 2024

The grant innovator form is a simple document I use to organize an agency as it seeks grants. Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with this surprisingly valuable document by checking out the link at the end of this article. By asking your colleagues to fill it out, you will tactfully motivate them to help you get grant funding. The form also subtly calls upon you and your associates to think through why a program is needed by your clients in the first place.

Grants

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

JANUARY 10, 2024

When I’m teaching grant-writing workshops outside the U.S. the participants sometimes ask me a very basic question: “Why do foundations give away money?” My answer is that in the United States, people who accumulate large amounts of wealth naturally want to see that wealth stay aggregated in one lump sum after they are gone. (I think it makes them feel better to know that their wealth will continue doing good things for the world long after they are gone.

Government

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

DECEMBER 22, 2023

Mele Kalikimaka! We wish you a Merry Christmas in Hawaiian because we are in Honolulu tonight enjoying the warm, rainy weather. We welcome a chance to recall the best of 2023. Surprisingly, neither of us native Californians had ever visited Death Valley, despite the fact it is only a four-hour drive away. In February, however, we took a tour of it and tasted the exceptionally pure salt at Badwater Basin, a salt flat located 282 feet below sea level.

IT

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

NOVEMBER 23, 2023

We want to take a moment to let you know how thankful we are to have customers like you. We wish you and your family the best this Thanksgiving and throughout the holiday season. Feel free to contact us anytime you have grant writing questions or concerns. Sincerely, John & Trish Drew Lightning Fast Grant Writing john.drew@lightningfastgrantwriting.

Grant Writing

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

NOVEMBER 16, 2023

For better or worse, the last two weeks of December are the worst possible time for fundraising activities. The problem is that your donors – individual, corporate, or foundation – are too busy during the holidays to worry about the needs of your charity. Nevertheless, you can make the best use of those last two weeks if you turn your attention to internal projects that otherwise might be neglected due to the business of the year.

Strategic Plan

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

FEBRUARY 23, 2023

Due to the spread of COVID-19 those of us with jobs and businesses spent a lot more time working from home. For some, this was a great triumph. I have a friend who told me he thinks this is a harbinger of a brave new world where almost all of us have given up commuting and instead work from the comfort of our dining room table. As he said, “It makes no sense to drive one hour just to go from one computer screen to another computer screen.” Despite my friend’s common-sense obser

Grant Writing

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

MARCH 1, 2023

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us got our first taste of working from home. If your experience is anything like mine, then I think there is good reason to be cautious about the benefits of working from home. One of the things that makes the office more productive is peer pressure. It forces you to show up on time and leave on time. Moreover, in the office, you are in a competitive environment and the social pressure for performance is immense.

Application

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

MARCH 6, 2023

I have worked out of my home for nearly my whole life. Out of necessity, I have learned some tricks for improving my productivity. Mainly, they all boil down to the necessity of staying in the zone – this is the happy, fulfilling state of productivity when the day seems to fly by because you are concentrating so hard and so completely on a mesmerizing task.

IT

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

MARCH 21, 2023

LAGUNA NIGUEL, CA – As you may know, Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) is the story of a middle-aged Chinese immigrant who is swept up into an insane adventure in which she alone can save existence by exploring other universes and connecting with the lives she could have led. We watched it last night after learning that it had won seven awards at the 95th Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenpl

Grant

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

MARCH 27, 2023

As I have grown my business, I have found I now have to spend more time training our staff on the basics of grant research. It turns out that grant research is both extremely important and surprisingly difficult to do right. Most grant researchers find that they stumble on a ton of possibilities or else none at all. Consequently, they need to know how to adjust their search to find more or fewer prospects.

Electronics

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

APRIL 4, 2023

My charismatic brother, Rick Drew, has an uncanny ability to meet celebrities. In the collage above you can see him in photos with Danny Trejo, Gabriel Iglesias, Paula Abdul, and Harry Hamline. He is a master networker who charms the stars with his intelligence, good looks, and affable personality. In a similar fashion, successful grant writers are usually masters of leveraging the strengths of their personal network.

Grant

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

JUNE 26, 2023

LAGUNA NIGUEL, CA – My schedule is not as busy as Elon Musk. Nevertheless, I like to run a tightly organized staff meeting when I get together with our senior grant writers, research assistants, and marketing staff. Here are the tips that I follow to create an effective Lightning Fast meeting. 1. Punctuality: My meetings start and end exactly on time.

Pass-Through

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

JULY 5, 2023

As a political scientist, I am always interested in how political consultants used direct mail to raise money and advertise their political candidates. As a grant writing consultant, I have adopted a lot of these same techniques to benefit the non-profit clients we serve at Lightning Fast Grant Writing. Many of the political consultant’s best ideas were the result of early eye-tracking experiments.

Letter Of Inquiry

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

JULY 19, 2023

LAGUNA NIGUEL, CA – The new Tom Cruise thriller, Dead Reckoning Part One , will be in theaters in July 2023. The return of Ethan Hunt reminds us that one of the most important secrets of success for grant writers is to blow away the funder. After funders have read your application, they should be in awe of your charity. This is particularly true when you are writing grants for a new charity that lacks the built-in credibility of older charities.

Grants

Lightning Fast Grant Writing

JULY 24, 2023

Federal grants are highly competitive. These grants can become quite technical and your ability to win may depend on the last-minute relationships you build with people who have very specialized expertise. Below, I will give you a peek at the techniques I use to manage these temporary but very important relationships. Since I do not do academic research full-time anymore, I find I am now more dependent on the goodwill and understanding of national-level research/evaluation consultants.

Consulting