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Creating Fundable Grant Proposals: Profiles of Innovative Partnerships
Grant money can make all the difference in developing new services, creating worldwide access to your unique collections, or enabling you to showcase awarded projects that advance your career. But competition for grants is as fierce as ever. To get a leg up, you need an insider who will share proven strategies for success. In this book, Bess G. de Farber, who has led the management of 187 awarded grant projects from under $5,000 to more than $1 million at the University of Florida, does just that. Drawing from profiles of 57 grant proposals, sponsored by 31 funders including federal agencies, foundations, and library organizations, her detailed 10-step workflow guides you through submitting and managing collaborative grant proposals. You will learn
240 pages, Paperback
Published June 25, 2021
7 people want to read
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August 16, 2022
Bess de Farber’s 2021 ALA Editions book Creating Fundable Grant Proposals is an invaluable resource to any professional interested in developing collaborative grant-seeking activities and partnerships within their organization and network. While it is a useful resource for professionals from various disciplines, it is particularly relevant for library, archives, and information professionals who are involved or interested in grant-seeking. De Farber served as the grants manager for University of Florida Libraries and University of Arizona Libraries and has thirty years’ experience providing grantsmanship instruction for audiences at various levels. She is an expert in grant writing and has helped to secure millions in grant funding for collaborative academic library and other nonprofit projects. This book highlights successful and distinguished grant proposals from University of Florida’s George A. Smathers Libraries over a ten-year period from 2009 through 2019.
The bulk of the volume provides engaging profiles of these selected project proposals that function as case studies and model effective project planning and grant seeking in an academic library environment. Creating Fundable Grant Proposals is organized into six chapters. Chapters 2 – 5 highlight grant partnership proposals for different cash request amounts. Respectively, those funding ranges are <$5,000 in Chapter 2, $5,001 – $25,000 in Chapter 3, $25,001 – $100,000 in Chapter 4, and >$100,000 in Chapter 5. These chapters that focus on proposal profiles are bookended by an introductory chapter and a concluding chapter that outlines ten recommendations for successful collaborative grantseeking. The book includes one comprehensive index, as well as a sponsor/program index and a project type index.
Chapter 1, titled “Creating Collaborative Grant Partnerships,” begins with a presentation of de Farber’s underlying philosophy that emphasizing assets already existing within an organization can positively transform project planning and grant seeking activities. This introductory chapter also provides an overview of the history and accomplishments of the Grants Management Program at George A. Smathers Libraries. It outlines methods the program has used to support grant-seeking activity as well as the amounts that different types of grants were awarded from 2009 – 2019.
As mentioned previously, the grant proposal profiles included in Chapters 2 – 5 span across most of the book and serve as its focus. Each chapter contains between 10 – 20 proposals, with a total of 57 proposal profiles sponsored by 31 funders included in the entire work. Each profile is structured with a prologue, a proposal summary, and an epilogue. The prologues describe the history of each project or the opportunities for growth that initiated them. They highlight the project team’s assets and describe the initiatives already in motion while explaining how external resources could be applied. The proposal summaries encapsulate the aims of each given project, explain how awarded funds would be applied, and include the roles of individual project team members. Finally, the profiles’ epilogues explain if and to what extent the project was funded, detail how external resources were applied, and provide the status or outcome of the project at the time of the book’s writing. Each chapter ends with a bullet list of takeaways that entail useful tips for writing grant proposals supported by evidence of the proposals detailed throughout the chapter, as well as references with links that direct readers to the full proposals presented in each chapter.
The concluding chapter, “Ten Steps for Successful Grantseeking with Partners,” offers guidelines for identifying grant opportunities and submitting proposals in partnership with others. The guidelines are immensely valuable for anyone interested in grant-seeking activities. Though this is one of the book’s briefest chapters, it provides a foundation for the work that is described in the case studies presented throughout the book. These guidelines and the profiles that are shared throughout the book will prove fundamentally instrumental to information professionals who are new to grant writing or are experienced grant writers, alike. Readers interested in more foundational guidance on grant-seeking can supplement their reading of this work with de Farber’s 2016 book, Collaborative Grant-Seeking: A Practical Guide for Librarians.
The bulk of the volume provides engaging profiles of these selected project proposals that function as case studies and model effective project planning and grant seeking in an academic library environment. Creating Fundable Grant Proposals is organized into six chapters. Chapters 2 – 5 highlight grant partnership proposals for different cash request amounts. Respectively, those funding ranges are <$5,000 in Chapter 2, $5,001 – $25,000 in Chapter 3, $25,001 – $100,000 in Chapter 4, and >$100,000 in Chapter 5. These chapters that focus on proposal profiles are bookended by an introductory chapter and a concluding chapter that outlines ten recommendations for successful collaborative grantseeking. The book includes one comprehensive index, as well as a sponsor/program index and a project type index.
Chapter 1, titled “Creating Collaborative Grant Partnerships,” begins with a presentation of de Farber’s underlying philosophy that emphasizing assets already existing within an organization can positively transform project planning and grant seeking activities. This introductory chapter also provides an overview of the history and accomplishments of the Grants Management Program at George A. Smathers Libraries. It outlines methods the program has used to support grant-seeking activity as well as the amounts that different types of grants were awarded from 2009 – 2019.
As mentioned previously, the grant proposal profiles included in Chapters 2 – 5 span across most of the book and serve as its focus. Each chapter contains between 10 – 20 proposals, with a total of 57 proposal profiles sponsored by 31 funders included in the entire work. Each profile is structured with a prologue, a proposal summary, and an epilogue. The prologues describe the history of each project or the opportunities for growth that initiated them. They highlight the project team’s assets and describe the initiatives already in motion while explaining how external resources could be applied. The proposal summaries encapsulate the aims of each given project, explain how awarded funds would be applied, and include the roles of individual project team members. Finally, the profiles’ epilogues explain if and to what extent the project was funded, detail how external resources were applied, and provide the status or outcome of the project at the time of the book’s writing. Each chapter ends with a bullet list of takeaways that entail useful tips for writing grant proposals supported by evidence of the proposals detailed throughout the chapter, as well as references with links that direct readers to the full proposals presented in each chapter.
The concluding chapter, “Ten Steps for Successful Grantseeking with Partners,” offers guidelines for identifying grant opportunities and submitting proposals in partnership with others. The guidelines are immensely valuable for anyone interested in grant-seeking activities. Though this is one of the book’s briefest chapters, it provides a foundation for the work that is described in the case studies presented throughout the book. These guidelines and the profiles that are shared throughout the book will prove fundamentally instrumental to information professionals who are new to grant writing or are experienced grant writers, alike. Readers interested in more foundational guidance on grant-seeking can supplement their reading of this work with de Farber’s 2016 book, Collaborative Grant-Seeking: A Practical Guide for Librarians.
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