Thomas Assel, GPC

05 Sep

Posted at 19:00h in Competency Four, Competency Seven, Grant Reporting, Grants Management, Organizational Development, Program Development, Thomas Assel, GPC, Tracey Diefenbach, GPC
Are you laboring too much over grants? Grants are great to have, and they’re often crucial to an organization’s mission, but there are only so many hours in the day to apply for and manage those grants. Grant professionals are susceptible to burn out from the heavy responsibility and high-pressure, deadline-driven work, which continues day in and day out in our profession. Grant applications and management can even get in the way of your organization’s mission. I was recently on a call with a client who was looking for help managing their grant portfolio. When I asked why they were seeking support, the client shared a striking comment: “We are so busy trying to get the money that we struggle to actually carry out the work.” I understood completely because I’ve seen this state of affairs before.

03 May

Posted at 17:50h in Competency Nine, Thomas Assel, GPC, Writing
May is a month of growth. Trees leaf out more fully and flowers bloom. The temperature rises without being sweltering. We slip the cold bonds of winter and the chaotic weather of early spring, and we breathe deeply of air redolent with the fragrance of blossoms and freshly mown grass. I do, at least until my allergies cause my sinuses to shut tighter than a 100-words-or-less organizational description. As spring’s warmth sets in, we may clean out some of the clutter we accumulated during the long winter. Yes, May is a good month for decluttering our living spaces, and it’s a good month to declutter our writing. By paring down our writing to its essentials, we can be much more effective as grant writers. We can actually grow by shrinking. And not only can we reduce the physical space our writing occupies, but we can also reduce the effort needed to read it and understand it.

26 May

Posted at 21:55h in Competency Nine, Thomas Assel, GPC, Writing
We’re grant writers. We often have to fit lots of content into character, word, or page limits. We always have to worry about keeping a reader’s attention. One way we condense content is by using a series, a list of three or more items separated by commas. One way to confuse readers and lose their attention is to write series that don’t make sense. This blog post will help you avoid that so you can write as clearly and concisely as possible.

29 Mar

Posted at 20:42h in Competency Two, Julie Alsup, GPC, Organizational Readiness, Program Design, Program Development, Thomas Assel, GPC
In Part 1, we talked about finding and using existing needs assessments. But suppose no appropriate needs assessment data already exists. How do you start the needs planning process?

17 Feb

Posted at 17:26h in Competency Two, Evaluation, Organizational Readiness, Thomas Assel, GPC
In a previous post, Julie Alsup, GPC looked at competency 2.2 through a budget lens. For this post, I’ll look at an agency’s readiness to seek project funding through an evaluation lens. Evaluation is crucial to project sustainability, a key factor in grant requests. Carefully considering project evaluation can help an agency obtain grant dollars for a project.

03 Dec

Posted at 21:28h in Competency Five, Competency Four, Federal Grants, Organizational Development, Program Design, Thomas Assel, GPC
My wife, Julie Assel, likes writing federal grants. I’ve been told that’s odd, and I guess I can understand why. Consider your average small-to-medium foundation grant. It might be a 2-3-page letter with an attached organizational budget, maybe your 501c3 letter and a board roster, but nothing you haven’t seen ten or a hundred times before. On the more complex end of what we normally experience, you’ve got agencies like the Health Forward Foundation in Kansas City asking for all that plus a logic model and theory of change indicator chart, with a 15-page narrative limit on certain grants. Fifteen single-spaced pages is nothing to sneeze at. Federal grants can have even higher page limits and even more attachments. The SF-424 alone can take more time to fill out than some grants can take to write.