KMH Consulting’s On-Line Grant-Writing & Evaluation Resources Guide ©

Non-profit guides (http://www.npguides.org/index.html) are designed to assist established non-profit organizations and entities through the private and public grant writing process. The site provides helpful outlines and samples.

A good K-12 site that also has excellent general grant writing resources including samples of successful proposals is SchoolGrants.org at http://www.SchoolGrants.org.

About Nonprofit Charitable Organizations has some excellent fundraising and grant-writing resources on its web site at http://nonprofit.about.com/mbody.htm.

A good free directory of Foundations can be found at http://www.foundations.org/. This is a good place to research possible private grant sources.

Deborah Kluge has many excellent resources on her site http://www.proposalwriter.com/.

An excellent, but not free, grant research site is the Foundation Center Online (http://fdncenter.org/). This is a very useful site for finding the right funder for your programs.

The online Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (http://www.cfda.gov/) provides a database of all Federal programs. Another way to access federal grant opportunities is through Grants.gov ( http://www.grants.gov/), which allows organizations to electronically find and apply for competitive grant opportunities from all Federal grant-making agencies.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant and funding opportunities and requirements can be access through http://grants1.nih.gov/grants/. Some of the many on-line resources from NIH include:

• Funding opportunities and notices can be found at http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/index.html.
• NIH grant writing tips can be found at http://grants.nih.gov/grants/grant_tips.htm. One of these is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ grant writing tutorial at http://www.niaid.nih.gov/ncn/grants/default.htm.
• NIH maintains a number of information resources about its grant programs and activities at http://grants.nih.gov/grants/oer.htm. Some are descriptive materials that enable interested parties to learn about NIH grant initiatives, funding opportunities, and proposed and actual policy changes. Others provide historical data.
• The Computer Retrieval of Information on Scientific Projects (CRISP) is a searchable database of federally funded biomedical research projects conducted at universities, hospitals, and other research institutions. an online system (http://www.crisp.cit.nih.gov) updated quarterly that provides a brief description of and administrative data on each NIH-funded research project.

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has a good guide for writing NIH proposals at http://deainfo.nci.nih.gov/EXTRA/EXTDOCS/gntapp.htm#3. The website also has some links to others related resources.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant Proposal Guide (GPG) provides guidance for proposals to NSF at http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2004/nsf042/start.htm.

The Department of Labor (DOL) Contracting and Grant Programs web site can be found at http://www.dol.gov/oasam/grants/main.htm.

The Employmentand Training Administration (ETA) of the DOL guide Applying for ETA Grants: A Guide to the Competitive Grant Process is available free at http://www.doleta.gov/sga/ApplyingGrants.cfm - This includes an overview of grant programs, an explanation of how to apply for competitive ETA grants, tips on successful applications, an overview of thee review process, and tips on where to look for further information.

The Small Business Administration (SBA) has guidelines, tips, and other resources for writing SBIR/STTR proposals at http://www.sba.gov/sbir/indexsbir-sttr.html. Their Handbook for SBIR Proposal Preparation can be found at http://www.sba.gov/gopher/Innovation-And-Research/SBIR-Pro-Prep/

The Department of Energy (DOE) includes information about its grants at http://www.sc.doe.gov/grants/grants.html; and has information about SBIR/STTR proposals at http://www.science.doe.gov/sbir/, including an on-line power-point presentation about SBIR/STTR proposals (http://www.science.doe.gov/sbir/NEWWEB/presentation.ppt).

Dr. Eric Craig of Useable Knowledge LLC has put up a great logic model training program at http://www.usablellc.net/Logic%20Model%20(Online)/Presentation_Files/index.html.

On-Line Best Practice Resources

Mental Health & Substance Abuse: SAMHSA’s National Registry of Effective Programs (NREP) provides effective substance abuse and mental health programs for every community at http://modelprograms.samhsa.gov/.

The Department of Justice has a wide variety of youth violence prevention resources on its well-organized site at http://www.usdoj.gov/youthviolence.htm.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) has created the resource Reducing Alcohol Problems on Campus: A Guide to Planning and Evaluation. This is available free at http://www.collegedrinkingprevention.gov/NIAAACollegeMaterials/planEvalHandbook.aspx Other related and useful publications can be found at http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/Publications/.

The Department of Education (DOE) has published Identifying and Implementing Educational Practices Supported By Rigorous Evidence: A User Friendly Guide. This guide provides K-12 educational practitioners with user-friendly tools to distinguish practices supported by rigorous evidence from those that are not. It is available at http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/rigorousevid/index.html. More related resources from The National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE) are at http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ies/ncee/index.html.

The What Works Clearinghouse web site, http://www.whatworks.ed.gov, by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, gathers together current best practices in education. The introduction reads: “On an ongoing basis, the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) gathers studies of the effectiveness of educational interventions (programs, products, practices, and policies). We review the studies that have the strongest design, and report on the strengths and weaknesses of those studies against the WWC Standards so that you know what the best scientific evidence has to say.”

On-Line Evaluation Resources

Gene Shackman, Ph.D. and The International Consortium for the Advancement of Academic Publication have brought a great collection of resources together at the page Resources for Methods in Evaluation and Social Research (http://gsociology.icaap.org/methods/) This page lists FREE resources for methods in evaluation and social research. The focus is on "how-to" do evaluation research and the methods used: surveys, focus groups, sampling, interviews, and other methods. Most of these links are to resources that can be read over the web. A few, like the GAO books, are for books that can be sent away for, for free (if you live in the US), as well as read over the web.

The Evaluation Center of Western Michigan University (http://www.wmich.edu/evalctr/) site provides a great array of evaluation resources, as applied primarily to education and human services. They have numerous useful publications, many free, on evaluation.

The Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) Evaluation Working Group has an extensive set of electronic resources for evaluation, including many good links resources for creating logic models on the web at http://www.cdc.gov/eval/resources.htm.

The CDC also distributes a number of valid and reliable assessment tools in the publication Measuring Violence-Related Attitudes, Beliefs, and Behaviors Among Youths: A Compendium of Assessment Tools. It can be downloaded (print copies are no longer available) for free at http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/pub-res/measure.htm. Although this is geared toward programs designed to prevent youth violence, many of the assessment tools in it can be used to evaluate a range of youth programs.

The University of Wisconsin Cooperative Extension program has a great array of free program planning and evaluation resources at http://cecommerce.uwex.edu/showcat.asp?id=1606. They require Adobe Acrobat to download.

The W. K. Kellogg Foundation’s Evaluation Handbook is available free at http://www.wkkf.org/Pubs/Tools/Evaluation/Pub770.pdf.

The American Evaluation Association has numerous links on evaluation on their web site at http://www.eval.org/resources.asp. Although many of these links are of interest to evaluators, many are also of interest to people running programs.

The Michigan Department of Community Health has put on the web the Evaluation for Performance: Toolkit for Title IV Safe and Drug-Free Schools Programs. This toolkit includes surveys and their associated data entry spreadsheets for Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drug Prevention Programs. You can access these resources at http://www.michigan.gov/mdch/0,1607,7-132-2941_4871-15022--,00.html.

Another great resource for evaluation is the Digital Resources for Evaluators (DRE) created by Catherine Callow-Heusser; it can be found at http://www.resources4evaluators.info/. The DRE contains links to many resources for evaluators, but has not been updated in some time, so some links may no longer work.