Grantcraft

Grantcraft is a comprehensive guide to the full practice of strategic grant development-from identifying the right funding opportunity through proposal design, submission, award acceptance, grant management, closeout, and ethical stewardship.

Written for graduate students, nonprofit and public-sector professionals, healthcare administrators, organizational leaders, and grant practitioners, the substantially expanded second edition moves beyond the common assumption that grant success begins and ends with persuasive writing. Strong proposals emerge from disciplined decisions about organizational readiness, program design, financial feasibility, evidence, evaluation, community engagement, implementation capacity, and the responsibilities that accompany external funding.

Readers learn how to understand different types of grantmakers and funding systems; determine whether an opportunity should be pursued; conduct a structured grant feasibility study; design coherent programs using goals, objectives, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impact; develop defensible budgets and logic models; create meaningful evaluation strategies; and write, revise, and submit proposals that are clear, persuasive, compliant, and internally consistent.

The book also provides extensive treatment of areas increasingly central to contemporary grant practice. A dedicated chapter examines designing and writing grants with specialized and priority populations, emphasizing dignity, meaningful participation, accessibility, representation, consent, and accountability. Another explores the responsible use of artificial intelligence in grant development, including research, drafting, verification, privacy, bias, authorship, and institutional governance.

Unlike guides that end when the application is submitted, Grantcraft follows the grant into the post-award period. It addresses award review and acceptance, financial and program management, monitoring, reporting, change control, funder communication, audits, sustainability, closeout, and organizational learning. The final chapter brings these responsibilities together through a comprehensive framework for ethics, integrity, and responsible grant practice.

Throughout the book, practical frameworks, applied examples, recurring cases, learning objectives, discussion questions, and practitioner exercises connect academic understanding with professional decision-making. The result is not simply a guide to writing winning proposals, but a resource for becoming a more strategic, disciplined, ethical, and accountable grant practitioner.