Customer Reviews

The Complete Guide to Writing Effective & Award-Winning Grants: Step-by-Step Instructions With Companion CD-ROM

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The universe is filled with people with good ideas - ideas that could change the world, or at least a small portion of the world - if there was only a way to get the money to make them real. In fact, there is grant money out there for almost every noble idea, but most people who could quality for grant funding fail to get it, finding themselves overwhelmed by an intimidating and confusing process.

I personally know dozens of people - artists and writers, college bound students, inventors, small-business owners, home buyers and others whose lives would be improved if they could just find the money to fund their ideas.

For all those people, I highly recommend The Complete Guide to Writing Effective &Award-Winning Grants. They should keep it by on their desks .as their number-one resource for helping them get the funding they need to make their brilliant notions real.

This manual gives step-by-step information and includes everything anyone might need to know when they are looking for grant funding. From finding available grant programs, to knowing what grant funders want to know from you, to setting up a presentation - the directions are clear and concise and the information is comprehensive. This is a tool anyone even considering applying for grant funding should find extremely helpful. Everything is here between the pages, within easy reach, a tour guide to every stage of the grant writing process. There are even examples of winning grant proposals to help grant writers better understand what works and what does not.

The book covers grant writing for artists, teachers and students as well as helping find and win grant money for small business, historic homes, buying or fixing-up houses, even grants for research, charitable causes, volunteers and more. The guide can also steer you to sources of available grant money, both public and private. It gives guides to networking with the people who hold the purse strings and even explains how to target your search for grant money for the greatest chance of success.

Author Dianne Harris learned grant writing through trial and error. You can learn from her mistakes and her successes and write successful grants without the pain. While this book won't make grant writing easy - nothing can do that - it will make your grant writing more effective, helping you through the process to a successful conclusion. Even if you have written grants in the past, if you follow the advice given, you should find yourself more confident and more successful in this endeavor.

Millions of dollars in grant money floats around today waiting to be claimed. "The Complete Guide: To Writing Effective & Award Winning Grants" seeks to help you lay claim to some of that money, a gift to help your organization, whatever it may be, flourish and succeed. To get that money is not an easy process, and "The Complete Guide: To Writing Effective & Award Winning Grants" will help you write the effective proposal you need to get a hold of the thousands of dollars you also need. Highly recommended to small businesses, researchers, or anyone who may need to write a grant proposal, and should have a place on all money/business community library shelves. Comes with a companion CD-Rom.

***** 5 out of 5


As an aspiring grant writer, this book will become my bible. The author does a great job of not only covering the mechanics of grant writing but also gives a brilliant overview of what kinds of organizations might need an outsourced grant writer, and the hurdles both that organization and their selected grant writer might face.

I now understand that as a freelance grant writer, I should expect to manage my client as well as my work process. It had not occurred to me that before I accept any project, I should examine the viability of the organization preparing to apply for the grant. Just as organizations perform their due diligence in selecting a grant writer, the grant writer must also perform due diligence to determine the feasibility of both the hiring organization and the project in question. These are lessons far too painful to learn in the professional realm and this book will assure me that I don't have to suffer this learning curve.

The step by step instructions in the second half of the book read like a recipe. They are simple, straightforward, and easy to follow. Mixed in are good "tips" to remember and abide that help the grant writer stay focused on the task at hand. Now that I have completed the book, I have the confidence to undertake grant writing professionally. Even if I get stymied, this book covers almost any contingency imaginable. I am sold on Dianne Harris' book.

I haven't written a grant proposal in a number of years, and needed a refresher. This book was just what I needed! It explains in great detail the considerations you need to take when writing a grant, as well as explaining the process through to completion. The author provides numerous real-life examples throughout the book, with lots of helpful resource web links. I appreciated the fact that she broke down the process into small manageable steps. There's even a guide on how to get organized before you start. The author also stressed the fact that the process isn't over once the grant is awarded, and that you still have obligations to meet. That's a detail that is often overlooked.

Overall, I would recommend this book for someone who has never written a grant request before, or for someone like me who needs to get back up to speed. There's a great checklist in the back of the book with a timeline that's broken down by week. This is a tool I'll definitely use!

The tagline of 1996's Jerry McGuire made it sound so easy: "Just show me the money!" In a Hollywood script, the demand might have the desired result, but in this well-organized guide, Dianne Harris explains the differences in the real-life world of grant-seeking.

Carefully outlining the process, Harris takes the reader step-by-step from the critical pre-grant application research and information-gathering, the outlining and writing of the proposal, and all the way through the grueling wait-and-see period. As a bonus, the author offers additional advice as to what should be done even after a grant has been awarded so that more grants may follow.

Complementing her experienced and well-informed "How to" guide is a comprehensive list of "Where to" websites and addresses that leave virtually no proverbial stone unturned in the search for funding and/or services. There is emphasis on building a solid and well-researched foundation for grant application, the need for strong and accurate writing, and--equally as important--the need to "network" effectively: "As you learn of these [opportunities], you are morally obligated to share your knowledge with others. This might seem to create more competition for the funds you are interested in winning, but generosity is always rewarded in kind. Through networking you learn to be a `giver' yourself."

In the real world, "Show me the money!" is quickly rejoined by "Show me why I should show you the money!" For those who anticipate making grant application, or even those who might be receiving and assessing such application, Harris's book is a "must-read."

The Complete Guide to Writing Effective & Award-Winning Grants is an outstanding resource not just for the novice but also for the experienced grant writer. I'm sure there are a lot of highly skilled people who find themselves unexpectedly placed in the position of soliciting funding for their organization and despite their skills and qualifications find themselves overwhelmed with the scope of the task. This book is a thorough guide to the entire process and gives enough information about what grant providers are looking for that any reasonably competent professional should be able to write a bulletproof grant request. This takes you from the basic steps of finding available funding to showing informative examples of every piece of documentation you will need to provide to the funding organization.

I was especially impressed with the chapter on what to do after the grant is awarded. This is not information that is typically covered in guides on grant writing, but for any organization that has never been through this process before this information is invaluable. In fact, much of the book's emphasis on business planning and project management makes it a good primer for any start up and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone who is opening their own business as a guide to managing and sustaining a business.

Grant writing is a task that seems simple but can leave the uninitiated dying a death of a thousand paper cuts. "The Complete Guide to Writing Effective and Award-Winning Grants" breaks the process down with such detail and simplicity that it leaves the reader inspired and ready to start hitting up non-profits.

Reminding that millions of dollars in grant money go unclaimed each year, author Dianne Harris lays out a long list of tips for finding grants, from Web sites to writing seminars, before going into a meticulous step-by-step on how to tailor a pitch and draft a winning grant application. Full of samples, appendices and lists of useful Web sites, this book will leave any attentive reader with a masterful knowledge of the basics, even if they never before knew a `program synopsis' from a `needs statement'.

This book really surprised me, I expected it to be a "How To" that like every other one, puts me to sleep, but I was pleasantly surprised. Every topic is broken down into categories, within each chapter. The page set up is easy on the eyes; I didn't feel overwhelmed especially since this book contains a well of knowledge.

It's amazing how much is available to us, if we know how to acquire it properly. I found the case studies very interesting to read, and the samples in the book really give you all the templates you need to write a successful grant. One thing that caught my attention was all the different websites and resources in the book. I checked out one of the websites that was listed and it had links to different contests and grants available to writers. If that link was not in the book, I would never have found it or even knew that it existed.

If you're interested in writing grants, or need a refresh on grant writing this book is for you. Even if you're not writing but trying to get a grant for a certain endeavor, you might want to check out this book. Grant writing is not as easy as some may say, you can write a great proposal, but if you miss one key element you could lose the grant. This book will teach you how to do the research, organize it, present it and win that grant.

The book is easy to read and steps are clear. Have not written a grant proposal but am confident that I will be able to with the help of this book.

This was one of many grant writing books I purchased in order to get a solid grasp on writing proposals. The text and the CDROM together make this a win! Easy to understand and not muddled with any extraneous information.