Choosing the Right Grant Writer

In a previous post, I explained why a grant writer can't be judged by their batting average. I also promised to elaborate on the four basic elements needed to select a grant writer for your organization: knowledge, expertise, familiarity, and clarity.

Knowledge and expertise are two distinctly different qualities in a great grant writer. Knowledge is simply knowing about grants - knowing who is making grants, what grants are out there, where to find funding notices, why particular issues are being addressed by funders, how to read an RFP, and what must go in the proposal. Knowledge can be gained a variety of ways, through a formal education or by reading and conducting research. (In fact, knowledge can even be gained by reading this blog!) Anyone can be knowledgeable about grants if they invest the time and effort to gain that knowledge.

Expertise, on the other hand, cannot be gained simply by reading a book or taking a class. To gain expertise, you have to roll up your sleeves and set about the dirty work of actually writing funded grants. Expertise isn't just about experience. You can gain a lot of experience writing a hundred grant proposals, but if none of them are funded, you haven't demonstrated that you have expertise in writing grants (just lots of experience in futility). On the same token, just because someone managed to write a single funded proposal, that does not make them an expert. Sometimes beginner's luck really happens and even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while.

Familiarity is a little trickier to define. As I've posted previously, true professional grant writers are typically generalists. You don't need a green energy grant writer or an education grant writer or a municipal projects grant writer - you just need a grant writer. That being said, the grant writer still needs to have a general familiarity with what it is you are trying to accomplish. A grant writer doesn't need to be a thirty year teaching veteran and a nationally renowned health education expert to write a school-based teen pregnancy prevention grant. But, they do need to know whether you intend to deliver abstinence only or comprehensive sex education and have a general understanding of the differences between the two. This is a fairly simplified example, but it's adequate to make my point about the level of familiarity required to write a grant. Don't believe me? I've written successful grants for K-12 public schools, municipal projects, and green energy, just to name a few. I've also never taught school, worked in city government or taken chemistry or physics. I do, however, have general understanding of best practices in preventing school violence, the economic development impact of storm water management, and the amount of carbon emissions offset by a five kilowatt photovoltaic power installation, among other things.

The last element, clarity, is a two-way street. Obviously, you are going to want a grant writer who clearly communicates what you can expect in return for your investment and exactly how much you should expect to invest. What a lot of organizations miss is that the organization must also have the capacity to clearly communicate the information needed by the grant writer. To make your relationship with your grant writer work, you must be prepared to provide: reliable, responsive points of contact; well-defined goals and priorities; background information on past and existing revenue streams, particularly past grant awards; and, organizational documents, including, but not limited to, letters of incorporation or charters, proof of non-profit status, accounting records, organizational charts, and resumes of key personnel. If you know internal barriers to effective communication exist within your organization, it is advisable to resolve or eliminate those barriers before commencing a relationship with a grant writer.

Why Grants Don't Solve Problems: We Need More Money

The title of this post is pretty tongue-in-cheek, but in some respects it is also true. Particularly in the non-profit world, there is always going to be a need for more funding. While we may write grant proposals eloquently detailing how we intend to wipe out any of a myriad of problems, for the most part we can only make things better; we can't cure everything. Even when we do make excellent progress in feeding the hungry or reducing teen pregnancy, someone else will become destitute or another generation of teenagers will come along and we will have to start all over again.

I don't mean to sound hopeless; I actually think it is a wonderful thing that all of these do-gooders keep plugging along trying to make the world a better place despite near impossible odds of actually doing so. And, in reality, they do make the world better. Sure, a new stomach may be empty tomorrow, but someone is very grateful to have a full one today.

This thought process is ultimately the key to finding one of the most elusive little monsters roaming the grant world - continuation funding. Continuation, or sustainability, funding hinges on the one thing you would least expect - solving the problem. See, once you've gotten a grant and you properly evaluate it, you've accumulated evidence that you are effective at making a dent in the problem. No one expects you to solve all the world's problems with one little grant or program, but your evaluation is cold, hard evidence that what you are doing is effective and merits further investment.

Of course, it never hurts to have a well-prepared explanation for why the problem persists too.

This isn't Baseball: Why Grant Writers Don't Have Batting Averages

Along the same vein as my previous post about how to tell if a grant writer is legit, I would like to address why you can't judge a grant writer by their ratio of written to funded proposals. Search the web a bit and you can find all kinds of preposterous claims from grant writers touting certain success rates and self-described experts claiming any grant writer worth their salt ought to maintain some arbitrary (made up) ratio. All of this is bogus.

In reality, there are way too many variables that effect a grant writer's success rate for it to be a reliable measure of their effectiveness. Here are a few examples:

• If a grant writer only writes three grants per year and they are all to funding sources with an established funding relationship with the organization, the grant writer could easily tout a 100% success rate - but they haven't actually done anything all that impressive.
• Grant writers are often pressured by clients or their employer, if they aren't independent consultants, to write grants for which the organization is not eligible. This is more common among direct-hire grant writers; consultants are more likely to decline a project that they know is not likely to be funded.
• Perfectly great proposals sometimes aren't funded. A funding principle called "geographic distribution" is often to blame for this. An agency may have funded a disproportionate number of grants in the southeast in their last competition and place a priority on funding projects in the mid-west and northeast in the current cycle. Unfortunately geographic distribution priorities often aren't published in the RFP. (This can be avoided to some extent if you take the time to do your homework.)
• Focusing too much time and energy on maintaining a target success rate on the part of the grant writer can be very detrimental to the organization needing funds. A grant writer who is put in the position of needing to meet target ratios will only pursue the surest funding possibilities. Going out on a limb to pursue new funding sources or seeking funds to support diverse projects can have a dramatic impact on an organization's revenue, but isn't likely to happen if the grant writer can't take chances.

The list above could go on and on. The factors described are by no means a cop out; they are simply realities in the grant writing world. While batting averages are irrelevant and there is no one-size-fits-all way to evaluate grant writers, a few general principles can be applied to choosing the right grant writer for your organization.

• Knowledge - Choose someone who is clearly knowledgeable about the world of grant funding.
• Expertise - Find a legitimate grant writer who has written funded proposals.
• Familiarity - A talented grant writer can formulate a winning proposal for any type of project without having first-hand knowledge or experience in a particular field, but a grant writer who really wants your business will do their homework and have a good general idea of your organization's goals and principles before they start on the first proposal.
• Clarity - Setting clear expectations goes both ways. The grant writer should be able to tell you exactly what you are getting for your money (i.e. X number of proposals, an estimate of the number of billable hours your project will require, etc). And, the client or hiring organization should be able to tell the grant writer exactly what resources will be at their disposal (i.e. key points of contact, funding priorities, existing funders, etc).

For more on Choosing the Right Grant Writer, watch for an upcoming post that will elaborate on these four general principles.

Program Sustainability

If there were ever a term aptly designed to strike fear into the heart of a novice grant writer, it is Program Sustainability. Most RFP's these days require that the proposal describe a coherent plan for maintaining the project beyond the funding period. In some cases, this is easy, "once we use your money to build sidewalks, our guys in public works will maintain them." But in others, the grant writer is left to scratch their head, thinking, "I don't know where we're going to get the money now (yet), how am I supposed to know where we're going to find it thirty-six months from now?"

In a perfect world*, sustainability planning is incorporated into the project from day one. The first key to solving this puzzle is having a strategic plan in place. You need to know where you are today and what your organization is going to be doing thirty-six months from now before you can begin to address where you should be looking for funding, today and in the future. As part of the strategic planning process, you evaluate the types of projects you intend to implement, assuring that they are aligned to your organization's mission. Once you have determined which projects are necessary to support your mission, you begin designing a rough draft of the project.

The project design process is the stage at which sustainability should become a focus. Some project designs are inherently sustainable, particularly projects that focus on systemic change (i.e. professional development, training, etc). While other programs, like infrastructure projects, have a very definite set of maintenance costs that must be weighed against the benefit of the program. Still others, especially those involving a lot of personnel, are decidedly challenging from a sustainability standpoint. The best approach is to evaluate the project on the front end to determine if there are ways to maximize the benefit of the project while minimizing the long-term costs. (An example would be utilizing funding to train a large cross section of an existing workforce to implement a new programming strategy, rather than hiring all new employees to implement it.)

Once a rough draft of the project is in place, then the work of identifying appropriate funding source(s) begins**. The funding research stage is another area in which sustainability planning should be considered. It is a "no brainer" that we all prefer a five year grant over a twenty-four month grant, but there are other issues involved. Is there a planning grant available and will securing it first improve our chances of being awarded an implementation grant down the road? Are new competitions held bi-annually? Are multiple agencies funding the same types of projects on different cycles?

This is when having a seasoned funding research specialist becomes priceless. It takes a lot of time, effort and good old fashioned research to know: all of the funding sources out there; all of their respective funding cycles; and, all of the intricate relationships between various funding programs, both within an agency and across multiple agencies. (For example, it is almost impossible to learn that the federal Department of Education's, relatively small, Integration of Schools and Mental Health Systems grant is considered a precursor to the much larger, Safe Schools/Healthy Students grant, without actually talking to someone at ED or reading my blog.) Even I can't profess to know all of this, although I admit to knowing more than your average bear.

Going back to the importance of strategic planning, not only does your organization need an overall plan, as I've demonstrated here, each project needs its own strategic, long range funding plan. The RFP will likely require it and it's necessary to ensure that your project survives beyond the initial round of funding.

* Yet again, repeat after me, "the world of grants is never, ever a perfect world."

** If the process described above seems to be in exact reverse order from the way your organization pursues grants, you are Putting the Cart Before the Horse.

Don't Put the Cart Before the Horse: Pick Your Project, Then Your Funder

Sometimes I feel like I'm beating that poor dead horse that's being dragged around behind that ridiculous cliche cart - but nonetheless, here we go, again...

Don't write a proposal for a grant competition just because you happened to have found out about it. Pick your project, then go out and find the right source to fund it.

Grants are a wonderful way to inject your organization with cash to accomplish all sorts of spectacular things. Whether you're making the world a greener place, providing services to support underprivileged children in impoverished areas, or working on a cure for cancer, grants can provide the resources to take your mission to a whole new level. Grants are cold, hard cash; cash that buys the equipment, supplies, training, personnel or just about anything your organization requires to go toe-to-toe with the social issue you are battling. Who doesn't want or need cash?

Believe it or not, lots of organizations don't want grants, or at least there are individuals within organizations that don't want grants. While this may seem insane to the rest of us, these folks have a perfectly valid reason for not wanting grants - they've been burned.

Some went after the wrong grant (one that wasn't aligned with their mission) and found their organization strained by the pitfalls of mission creep. Some lacked the organizational capacity to implement the grant once they received it and created chaos and burden for their people. Others were forced to implement a grant they had no hand in developing and became resentful. While still more found the implementation to be nothing more than added work and couldn't see the benefit in it.

The moral of the story is: use grants wisely. They are one of the most valuable opportunities out there, but once an organization is burned, it is very hard to bring it back around. The best way to avoid getting burned is "Don't put the cart before the horse: pick your project, then your funder."

Strategic Planning and Finding the Right Fit: Why Social Service Agencies Shouldn't Apply for NASA Grants to Build Space Ships

Grant writers get the pleasure of dealing with all types of organizations, some of which are more organized than others. Among the most difficult clients to fund are those that approach strategic planning purely as something on paper, not a true reflection of their priorities, mission or focus. Without having a clearly defined set of priorities, many organizations wind up chasing after any grant that comes down the pike, then trying to conform their programming to a funding source that isn’t aligned to their mission, rather than selectively pursuing appropriate funding sources that meet their needs.

In the title of this post, I use a pretty extreme example of mission creep. Sure, you may think it's absurd to think that a social services agency would ever be so foolish as to pursue a NASA grant to build space ships, when rocket science obviously has nothing to do with social services*. But, I have witnessed, firsthand, attempts to pursue grants that were just as far removed from an organization's primary functions.

Ultimately, it is a compounding recipe for disaster. If an organization lacks the capacity to maintain a reasonable level of strategic planning, they really aren't a very good candidate for grant funding in the first place. If they then pursue grant funding in a scrambled attempt to secure any type of funding, from any source, they find themselves trying to keep a third ball in the air when they lack the coordination to juggle two.

Fortunately, most funders are adept at recognizing mission creep and these types of proposals are rarely funded. They just result in a lot of wasted time and effort - and no money. The more common problem arises when a lack of strategic planning undermines attempts to secure sustainability funding for an existing program. 


*Before I get hate mail for this, I was a social worker in my last life. My reference to social services not being rocket science is purely tongue-in-cheek.

Welcome Spring!

After a long, cold winter, spring has finally sprung! And along with the daffodils and crocuses, all kinds of new and exciting changes are blooming at Keller-Ferguson & Associates.

First up, we are embarking on a workshop tour across Tennessee. Join us for Grant Funding: Making Grant Writing Work for Your Organization, coming to Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, Chattanooga, and our hometown, Johnson City, in April and May.

Since our last grant writing workshop in 2013, our efforts have been focused on educational pursuits and in-depth professional development. While we haven't been accepting new clients and have only taken a very limited number of new projects, we have totally revamped our signature two-day training event to include all new insights, tips and tricks that you won't want to miss.

Our blog, Keller-Ferguson On Writing, has also been on hiatus. But, we're back and you can count on your weekly dose of newly published grant opportunities, proposal development tools, and strategies for grant winning success. In addition to our blog, later this year, we will be publishing our first book! Based on our highly successful workshop, the book is a compilation of our tried-and-true best practices and a practical how-to guide for project development and grant writing. We can't wait to share it with you!

Over the next several months, we'll be moving into new offices in downtown Johnson City, rolling out a fresh, redesigned website, and introducing a wide array of new products and services. It is an exciting time at Keller-Ferguson & Associates and we hope you will follow us here as the story unfolds.