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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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