What's the Wrong Way to Do Lightning Fast Grant Writing?

Out of necessity, I think folks have developed some rough and ready techniques for speeding up the grant writing process. How many of these are evident in your shop?

1. Save time by waiting until the last minute to write the grant so that your are forced to go with your first draft and complete it in a minimal amount of time.

2. Save time by not writing the grant at all. This is when the agency decides as a group that the grant is not worth going after at all because of the risks involved, the lack of a perfect fit, and the high costs of administering a successful grant.

3. Assume that your Jedi mind powers have made it impossible for you to make a spelling or grammatical error.

4. Just copy, word for word, what someone else wrote the year before or on behalf of another agency.

5. Work really hard over a long period of time because - in comparison to the slackers - your efforts are actually extremely fast.

The truth is that we are all working in an extreme crisis atmosphere when we write grants and we need to use unusual techniques and planning to make things work. Ideally, my Lightning Fast Grant Writing Techniques workshops teach ideas that are more effective and more humane in the long-run.

Thought on Lightning Fast Grant Writing: Using Your Intuition

As I'm refining my ideas about lightning fast grant writing, I'm intrigued by the role that sports psychology plays in training someone to be a highly successful "great" grant writer.

One of the definitions of a great grant writer that I heard from someone else was that a great grant writer can write quickly about something they know absolutely nothing about. The ability to pull this off is important because the rules for writing the grant are constantly changing and grant writers are forced to stay ahead of the competition by understanding the latest developments in their charitable field.

To a certain extent, it helps to have a high level of self-confidence and a certain degree of detachment from what you are writing.

Technically, it also requires some skill in conducting research. The internet, of course, has made this process a lot easier. It is so much more fun to do grant research now when all I need to do is launch a Google search.

There are some other habits I've found helpful in writing quickly about things I don't understand.

First, I always write the grant first and then do the research later. The reason is that I have a tendency to over research if I haven't done my first draft first. If I force myself to go through the grant application questions and answer them to the best of my ability, I end up with a much clearer picture, practically speaking, of what I really need to be researching. Often, the things I thought were important at first, really aren't so important once I fully understand the grant.

Finally, I don't mind relying on my intuition when I create a first rough draft. Even if my ideas are completely wrong, they still provide a framework for the "experts" to tweek and adjust what I've provided as a framework for them. Also, using my intuituion is fun...and it often produces surprising, original, and helpful ideas. This is part of the reason I don't mind writing grants for a living...it give me an opportunity to let my imagination soar.

Here's a little 30 sec. video put together to remember our visit to Nashville, TN. See, http://ping.fm/2mQDh

finished up three applications to secure green jobs for Orange County, CA. Feel like I am the stimulus...