Rating: 
Summary: "Winning Grants" is a Winner
Review: I read "Winning Grants" by Mim Carlson from the perspective of a grant funder and a grant writer. I found the book to be an easy-to-read workbook for developing a quality proposal. The worksheets are helpful and having them on the CD in electronic format is a huge asset. The book seems touches on all of the key essentials for grant writing. I will recommend it to the novice grant writers that I work with.
Rating:
Summary: "Winning Grants" is a Winner
Review: I read "Winning Grants" by Mim Carlson from the perspective of a grant funder and a grant writer. I found the book to be an easy-to-read workbook for developing a quality proposal. The worksheets are helpful and having them on the CD in electronic format is a huge asset. The book seems touches on all of the key essentials for grant writing. I will recommend it to the novice grant writers that I work with.
Rating: 
Summary: Pragmatic worksheets
Review: If you come in to our nonprofit management support organization and ask for a book on grant proposal writing, there are two we'll pull out right away: Grassroots Grants and Winning Grants Step by Step. We're often asked which to choose. Of all the books we see, these are the two we most often recommend, but they do have different approaches.Winning Grants Step by Step takes a pragmatic tone. It accepts the rules of the game and offers to show you how to win within them. "Most funders prefer to give grants for new and expanding programs or in support of special projects and new ideas rather than for the general operating expenses of an organization or the ongoing costs of established programs," it explains. "Because funders have these preferences, this workbook uses the idea of creating a new program as the basis for developing a proposal." (The book does also give examples of core operating support proposals, and does start with a planning guide to help you see which programs fit your priorities).
In the introduction to Grassroots Grants, on the other hand, the publisher shares her qualms about publishing a book about grants at all, preferring that the reader focus first on developing more renewable and less restricted gifts from individual donors. "This book is about two things: money and power," says Grassroots Grants, and calmly analyzes the dynamics of both in the grant proposal process. This big-picture view is in the end more pragmatic - it encourages you to take control of the grantseeking process by searching out those funders and pitching those programs that really best fit with what you are trying to do. Both books have excellent project planning guidelines. As Winning Grants Step by Step observes, "Generally, organizations will spend approximately 80 percent of their time planning a project and only 20 percent of their time writing and packaging a proposal," so this section is obviously very important. Both books ask questions such as "What is unique about your organization's project?" "Is anyone else working on a similar project?" "What members of your community support each project?" Both also contain useful information about finding appropriate funders, which is key to the process - much more important than your writing skills is finding the right funder who cares about projects like yours. Although Winning Grants Step by Step puts this information at the end in an appendix, you should really read it first, particularly the excellent section on corporate giving programs. Grassroots Grants contains very helpful guidelines about what to consider when deciding whether a funder is really a good fit for your organization, and detailed information about ways to develop good relationships with potential funders. The books have different approaches to how they help you with your own writing. Winning Grants Step by Step has a workbook format, with questionnaires you fill out as you go, so that by the time you have completed them you will have addressed most of the subjects covered in a typical proposal, and it will be easy to cut and paste the appropriate bits into the funder's preferred format. It comes with all the worksheets on a CD-ROM so you can fill them out electronically and reuse them. If you like project planning, but get nervous about the writing process, this format may help walk you through. Grassroots Grants has questionnaires throughout the text, and it has more examples of proposals, query letters, and other documents with notes on how they were developed. If you like to write by reading examples to inspire you to your own purposes, this book will suit you. Ultimately, these books complement one another. Even if you prefer the workbook format of Winning Grants Step by Step, the "big picture" you get from reading Grassroots Grants will help you answer all those questions. Likewise, if you prefer the style of Grassroots Grants, you can still benefit from the excellent sections on overhead costs and planning for sustainability in Winning Grants Step by Step.
Rating:
Summary: A Must-Read for Beginning Grantwriters
Review: Mim Carlson is a highly regarded writer in the field of grantsmanship, and she takes a down-to-earth approach. Realizing that any project is easier if it's taken one task at a time, and that proposal writers don't always have the opportunity to work exclusively on a proposal, Carlson has created this workbook. With it, you can zero in on one step at a time, without feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the job ahead of you. And thanks to the worksheets provided, if your phone rings or you've got to rush off to a meeting or someone drops by your office, you can set aside your proposal, comforted in the knowledge that you'll be able to pick up where you left off.
Rating:
Summary: For beginners
Review: Mim Carlson's "Winning Grants" provides an excellent overview of what steps to follow when seeking foundation funding. It provides a fair amount of general information that will be useful for readers who lack proposal writing experience. Unfortunately, the book suffers from being a bit too general in its approach. The author attempts to cover both private and public grant writing, but the overlap between these two areas is not great enough to justify lumping them together. My only other complaint is that an index is not included.
Rating:
Summary: For beginners
Review: Mim Carlson's "Winning Grants" provides an excellent overview of what steps to follow when seeking foundation funding. It provides a fair amount of general information that will be useful for readers who lack proposal writing experience. Unfortunately, the book suffers from being a bit too general in its approach. The author attempts to cover both private and public grant writing, but the overlap between these two areas is not great enough to justify lumping them together. My only other complaint is that an index is not included.
Rating:
Summary: For beginners
Review: Provides a step-by-step framework for developing grant proposals using structured questions to help you draw out and organize your thinking. If you want basic how-to, this is it. The framework is particularly relevant for those raising funds for new projects. The book follows the development of a single proposal related to human services and, as a result, readers in that field will find it particularly easy to relate to. Excerpts of interviews with grantmakers about what they are looking for and a reprint of one foundation's actual proposal scoring sheet are valuable enhancements. The book also covers building relationships with funders and includes information about researching funders, which help to place proposal writing in a broader fund development context.
Rating:
Summary: Proposal Development 101
Review: Provides a step-by-step framework for developing grant proposals using structured questions to help you draw out and organize your thinking. If you want basic how-to, this is it. The framework is particularly relevant for those raising funds for new projects. The book follows the development of a single proposal related to human services and, as a result, readers in that field will find it particularly easy to relate to. Excerpts of interviews with grantmakers about what they are looking for and a reprint of one foundation's actual proposal scoring sheet are valuable enhancements. The book also covers building relationships with funders and includes information about researching funders, which help to place proposal writing in a broader fund development context.
Rating:
Summary: Great Addition to your Grantwriting Library
Review: The Alliance for Nonprofit Management's "Winning Grants Step by Step" (Second Edition), would be a useful resource for anyone trying to write winning proposals, either for the first time, or the hundredth time. The real value of the workbook is that it breaks the proposal development process down into manageable parts, and provides worksheets and exercises readers can easily complete. Anyone completing all the worksheets, answering each question and taking to heart the suggestions would definitely end up with a viable, well-written and competitive proposal. The CD-ROM makes things even easier. There, one can download all the worksheets and forms and see various examples of successful proposals. Access to well-written successful proposals is critical to seeing how answers on a worksheet are transferred to an actual real-life proposal. Kudos to Carlson for including these samples. While many books on grantwriting start off with Planning or Writing Objectives, a very positive aspect of this workbook is that is starts out by helping readers to assess the feasibility of their idea. Too often people waste precious time trying to articulate or actualize an idea that just isn't either right or ripe. One weakness of the workbook is that it speaks very little to the importance of reading and analyzing the proposal guidelines provided by funders. It would have been good to have a chapter (with worksheets and exercises) on careful, analytical reading of the provided guidance, especially for government grants. You can have a wonderfully written proposal, but if it does not follow the guidelines, it goes right into the "Don't Bother to Read" pile. While I agree that the basic proposal development process is the same no matter who the funder is, this book (without stating it) follows more closely the process of proposal writing for foundations or other private sector funders. Although government grants are mentioned throughout, the private sector focus should have been more clearly stated for the reader, and the distinctions between different types of funders' needs and requests explained at the outset. In the next edition, I would include website addresses for the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, the Federal Register and to fedgrants.gov, a brand new gateway to all federal grant opportunities. All in all, this workbook is a valuable addition to one's professional library.
Rating: 
Summary: Good for foundation grants, not so good for gov't grants
Review: The information contained in this book primarily applies to non-governmental entities soliciting grants from non-profit foundations. Organizations like the NSF, NIH, etc., have fairly strict guidelines and don't permit the "excesses" encouraged in this book. As the review title states, this would probably be a very useful book for a charitable organization looking to obtain funds from corporate foundations. However, if you're looking for research money from a government organization like Nat'l Science Foundation or Dep't of Education, this book is virtually useless.
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