Ten Tips for New Grant Consultants

Are you thinking of becoming a grant consultant?

Here’s something I learned early on: great writing alone doesn’t win grants — especially if your process with the client falls apart.

As I began this journey 15+ years ago, I quickly learned that finding alignment with clients, managing expectations, and navigating wildly different work styles were just as important as crafting a compelling proposal.

Aspiring and new grant consultants—here are ten “keeping it real” tips and tricks based on lessons learned, just for you!

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New to Grant Consulting? 10 Client-Focused Tips for Building A Successful Collaboration

1.       Partner with organizations whose work and approach aligns with your values. Writing about causes and programs you aren’t totally on board with (or don’t understand) is painful – and not in the good sense of growing pains.

2.       As an outsider you need the inside-scoop. You will need an in-house point person who is ready to dedicate time to answer your questions, so that you can learn not only about the organization’s work, but also truly grasp what makes them tick.

3.       Take time to understand the organization’s unique value and voice. It will show up in your writing.

4.      Make sure your clients know that you are not a magician; ROI and ‘results’ are not guaranteed. High grant award success rates are often a combination of solid relationships with funders combined with on-point grant writing (and many other factors).

5.       Nonprofits new to grants development may not know that many grant cycles are painfully long. Integrate this reality into funding targets and project planning. 

6.       Make sure your writing process is collaborative – strategize together with your client on your pitch and your main points of emphasis; you don’t want to hand in a draft and hear “that’s not the direction we wanted to go in” or “we want to fund a different program.”

7.       While staff buy-in is key, too many cooks (or in this case writers and editors) do spoil the soup.

8.       Keep yourself and the rest of your team of writers and contributors organized and accountable to their task timeline. This may feel like herding cats, at times.

9.       Most importantly, plan to submit with plenty of time before the deadline. Waiting for the last minute is almost guaranteed to trigger Murphy’s Law (if anything can go wrong it will) – it’s true. Portals crashing, internet failing. It’s happened to me.

10.   *Pro-Tip: Only work with clients who agree to use track changes for edits. I’m semi-serious about this one folks. For me, it’s a hard pass on working with folks who only want to give verbal feedback.

Grant Consultants: What consulting tips and tricks have worked for you? Please comment below.

My Grant Writing Journey

A motorized rickshaw known as a “Tuk Tuk” winding down a curvy road in Sri Lanka

Photo Credits: Javier Saint Jean

No one I’ve ever met started their career saying ‘I want to be a grant consultant.’ Those who end up here are usually mid-career and senior professionals whose careers have zigzagged through some interesting places first. If you want to know my story, here it is.

Part 1: The Floppy Disk Era

It was 1999, and my newly minted high-school graduate self had just been handed a document on a floppy disk and been asked to, “edit this grant proposal.” Let’s hit rewind for a moment.

Until the summer of 1998, my all-girls school in Sri Lanka was my whole world. The equivalent of a K-12 school, I graduated with nearly all of the same classmates I started with back in kindergarten. There’s something truly special about spending 14 years growing up with the same friends you first met dressed in little sundresses, with handkerchiefs pinned in the top left corner. (Kleenex in classrooms wasn’t a thing back then, but I digress).

Now, at 19, the world was my oyster.

While many of my friends soon launched into careers in law, banking, advertising, and other ‘respectable’ professions by Sri Lankan society standards, I decided to take a year off while applying for college in the USA. Through a contact, I found a ‘job’ where I would volunteer two or three days a week with a local nonprofit that served children who had experienced abuse.

With no official job description or title other than ‘volunteer,’ my tasks varied from day to day; from being an English-Sinhala translator, to creating a prototype of a board game about decision-making for kids (it never made it past my pencil sketches), and assisting with a film shoot for children about safe touch and speaking up.

Professionally, I was about as green as it gets, and I wouldn’t have known a grant proposal if it had flown in and hit me in the face! However, having taken advanced English writing classes in high school, I was able to write for a professional audience. So when the nonprofit’s therapist who was my informal supervisor asked me to edit a funding proposal, I took up the task. And apparently, I did a good job.

Part 2: Learning by Doing – Grad School and International Work

Fast forward through three years of college in Pennsylvania, I returned to Sri Lanka with an English Writing B.A. in hand. My new job as a program assistant at a large international development organization in Colombo (the capital city) put me on the execution side of grant writing. The proposal had been written, and now my team was tasked with implementing and reporting on the project that had been fully funded.

We found ourselves faced with a different type of challenge as we read and re-read the proposal goals and activities and puzzled over how to implement the grant proposal. The proposal had been written by foreign consultants who had literally “flown in and flown out.” None of the present team members had been around during the program design or proposal development process.  This experience raised a serious question in my mind: who should write the proposal for a new initiative?

Returning to the US once more, I took my first formal, intensive grant proposal writing class as part of my graduate studies in International Development in 2004. We spent time analyzing elements of international development proposals and writing a mock proposal of our own. This class was a solid introduction to professional grant writing. However, I attribute my development management class with helping me develop what I credit as the most important grant development skill of all time—the ability to sift through large volumes of information and distill and glean key data, and present it succinctly within the parameters of a writing assignment. In “grantspeak,” this is about cutting out all the irrelevant information and figuring out what’s most important to your pitch, and weaving it into your narrative to strengthen your argument—all while staying within the strict confines of a word count.

By the time I graduated with my M.A. in International Development, I had built a solid understanding of nonprofit grant writing and reporting, which prepared me for my next adventure: managing and reporting on USDA and USAID food security grants for a large international nonprofit in Washington, DC. Ensuring quality reporting while liaising between an implementing team in Asia and our US Government funding partners taught me a ton about the importance of communicating expectations and realities to team members. For example “team, we need to start the reporting process four weeks ahead of the deadline as I’m delivering six reports at the same time, and we need to build in time to address any issues.” Learning to build in enough time to pivot when the unexpected happens was another valuable lesson learned—like the time a team member’s plane caught on fire, and while he and everyone on board escaped safely, his laptop with report data was destroyed.

The next year, when a situation outside my control upended this job—the job that I thought was the launching point for my long-term career as an international development professional, it felt like the end of the world. By the time I was applying for jobs again, the 2007 recession was in full swing. Hundreds of hours of applications and interviews later, the discouragement was real. On a side-note, this career break gave me the gift of time where I was able to volunteer with an organization serving people without homes. This was one of those pivotal experiences that gave me new perspective and insight.

Part 3: Starting My Own Grant Consulting Business

Being unemployed and having lots of time to reflect, I asked myself what skills I’d gained over the years. I had certainly learned a lot about grants. With the support of my ever-supportive husband, I decided to go out on my own. I landed my very first nonprofit grant writing client, who had advertised on Craigslist (back then this was a legitimate platform for finding work). It was a small start-up nonprofit combining coastal livelihood development and environmental protection, and they needed help developing a master proposal to pitch to various prospects. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know my client, learning their work, and showcasing it as a wonderful opportunity for investing in a coastal community in Indonesia.

Since then, I’ve developed a passion for working with smaller nonprofits that are often early in the grant development journey. I met thoughtful, kind, smart, nonprofit leaders who are doing amazing work with limited resources; addressing critical needs like access to healthcare and housing and reincarceration in their communities— while challenging the deep-rooted systemic injustices that keep multiple generations facing the same struggles. These partners have taught me so much, not just about their missions and programs, but also through the humanity and humility and respect with which they serve their communities.

My grant journey, which began in 1999, has been a process of building brick by brick, with each experience paving the way for the next. I’ve met clients online and through in-person connections—Craigslist, Idealist, LinkedIn, casual neighborhood conversations and recommendations from past clients. The hustle of running a small business has been real and keeps me on my toes.  Here's to hoping that One Community Grant Consulting continues to create opportunities for learning and growth for all who are part of this journey!

I’m curious to know, what’s your story? What brought you here today? Please share below.