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.

Go Beyond Raising Money—Centering Justice in Fundraising Stories

Fundraisers are among other things, storytellers. During the planning stage of a grant application or an appeal letter, one question we ask ourselves is “whose story should I tell?”

But another important question we should be asking ourselves is “why am I telling this story?”

Presumably, your primary goal is to raise money. Fair enough.

What else, do you want to do with this story?

We usually want to elicit an emotional response to our stories. We want the ‘need’ to be compelling—yet also present some warm and fuzzy hope with our framing—where the writing appeals to the power that ‘you’ the donor/grantor have to make things better.

I don’t see this as a bad thing in and of itself.  But here’s the deal;

The concept of donor-centric writing, as the name suggests, typically focuses on the donor as the key figure in the story. The hero.  Done well, this kind of writing works; it raises more money because most people like to feel like the good guy who saved the day. Right?

Here’s where I see it getting problematic;

Fundraising stories are an opportunity to do more than raise money and build support for your cause.

Our stories can and should always prioritize elevating the voices of, and creating a platform for, those who are most often unseen and unheard.

Storytelling should call attention to privilege and societal structures that keep generational poverty and injustice alive and well. Story telling should be bold enough to hold up a mirror so each of us is aware of our own role in upholding the status quo.

Writing from the perspective of community-centric fundraising shifts the balance of power to one where we respect and build strong relationships with donors, while centering the communities we serve and benefit from. The way I see it, the ethos of donor-centric fundraising (which remember is to center the role and power of the donor) while effective at raising financial and other support, is another element and an extension of Jason Lewis’ critique of “the soft authoritarianism of institutional philanthropy.” If you think that criticism is overly harsh, read Lewis’ article and consider where the balance of power in our sector lies.

Complex problems like incarceration justice and mental illness and discrimination of all stripes don’t have shiny solutions and cannot be easily solved with a $25 monthly donation or even a grant of $50,000. Creating any type of seismic shift in these arenas is a work and commitment of years, and sometimes decades and generations. To pretend otherwise is an injustice to those who live through these challenges every day.

Individual donors and institutional grantors are not heroes or rescuers—but they can be powerful allies, and we need them.  I am appreciative of their support. We need their money, their public platforms and their networks. But let’s be clear, their role is to be a part of a movement that is bigger than themselves in tipping the scales of justice in favor of those who are often on the margins of society. This is a privilege and an honor.

True impact stories elevate the leadership and resilience of the communities doing the work. They invite donors not to “save,” but to stand in solidarity. So when you set the stage in your next appeal or grant application, invite your donors to be partners and advocates. But don’t call for any heroes.

I know this topic and view point can be controversial - please do share your perspective below!