Three Faulty Assumptions about Grant Writers
January 01, 2017
What happens when you want to pursue grant funding but don't have the time or the skills to write grants?
For many nonprofits and projects, the answer is to outsource the work to a grant writer.
Recruiting a grant writer can be beneficial. By delegating grant writing to someone else, the organization's staff can focus on their work, and the executive director can spend more time on program management.
While hiring a grant writer to handle the grant writing can make a lot of sense for these reasons, nonprofit and project administrators often have unrealistic expectations of what a grant writer can (and should) do. These misaligned expectations can lead to disappointment on both sides after a grant writer joins the team.
If you are a nonprofit or project administrator and are considering hiring a grant writer, there are three common assumptions about grant writers you'll want to avoid when reviewing candidates.
1. Believing a Grant Writer's Success Rate is an Indicator of Skill
If you have ever applied for a grant-writing position, you may have been asked during the interview, "What is your success rate ?" Said another way: "Of the proposals you've written, how many were funded?"
It may seem blasphemous to say that a grant writer's success rate doesn't matter. However, a grant writer rarely writes a proposal alone, and a proposal receives funding for various reasons, many of which are beyond the grant writer's control.
Proposals develop in stages. Behind almost every proposal, you'll find project ideas and text contributed by more than one person. One of the roles of the grant writer is to pull the proposal sections together and edit the text so it reads as a single voice. She may also handle copyediting. Additionally, a critical function of the grant writer is to ensure that the proposal conforms to the funder's guidelines and is responsive to the funder's questions and stated needs. If the funder has defined a problem and is requesting proposals with potential solutions, the grant writer helps ensure the proposal stays focused and answers the questions posed.
Asking for a success rate during a hiring process makes sense when there is a direct link between a person's actions and the outcome. For example, in a sales environment, a "win" (a sale) can be viewed as having a direct line to a single salesperson's efforts. In grant writing, a successfully funded grant proposal never has a direct line back to the grant writer. The grant writer contributes to a proposal and may control some of its development, but she is never fully responsible for the final product.
Questions relating to success rate don't produce a helpful answer about the grant writer's skills for four reasons:
It can be difficult to determine how a grant writer's contributions contributed to the success or failure of a particular grant. An exception to this is when a grant writer failed to meet a submission deadline or otherwise failed to perform a task solely her responsibility.
Grant writers are usually not the subject-matter experts on a proposal team. The grant writer relies on others with experience and education in the field to write the proposal's substantive or technical content. If the core content is poorly conceived—something the grant writer may not be able to assess—the proposal will not be funded. To perceive an unsuccessful proposal as a failure of the proposal writer is to overlook the team-based nature of proposal development.
The odds are against success. Most grant proposals are not funded. A foundation's or government agency's award decisions are based on a variety of factors, many of which are unrelated to the quality of the submitted proposal. For example, a funder may announce a funding opportunity, but it could be wired for an incumbent organization. An unsuccessful proposal doesn't necessarily mean it was poorly written or didn't meet the funding guidelines.
For many funders, the budget, not the proposal's narrative, is the tipping point in deciding whether to fund a proposal. A grant writer may have little control over the development or presentation of the budget. Additionally, a grant writer cannot control or predict competitors' behavior. A competitor organization may submit a similar proposal with a smaller budget and still receive the award.
If you decide to ask a grant writer for her proposal success rate during an interview, and she gives you a high success rate, you'll need to ask some follow-up questions to tease out her contributions. What was her role in each proposal? How much of each grant did she write? Did she control the process? Did she build the budget?
The applicant may have some numbers to share in response to these questions. Regardless, the applicant will likely not be able to provide supporting documentation in the form of a spreadsheet listing every proposal she has ever worked on, the foundations to which they were submitted, and their outcomes.
What is an alternative question that might get you closer to what you need to know? The question "What is your success rate?" attempts to address "How good are you?" For the reasons outlined above, it doesn't perform well. Instead of asking about the success rate, a way to find out whether the applicant has the experience and qualifications you seek is to ask questions such as:
What types of funders have you submitted grants to (government, family foundations, corporate foundations, etc.)?
What has your role been in the proposal process? Have you been the lead writer?
Can you describe your proposal preparation process? What are the steps in your process to make sure a proposal is submitted on time and meets the funder's guidelines?
Asking process questions can provide more indicative information about whether the person is a good fit for the job than a success-rate question, which isn't meaningful without additional context.
2. Believing a Professional Writer Makes the Best Grant Writer
Someone who writes well can excel as a grant writer. However, a grant writer may not spend much of their time writing. In fact, the bulk of her time may be spent coordinating others' contributions, editing, and managing the submission process.
When searching for a grant writer, placing greater value on writing skills than on other skills, such as coordinating teams, can lead the proposal process to fall short. The final proposal might be well written if a professional writer works on it, but it may be a difficult process unless the person also has some experience managing proposals.
If you need a grant writer who writes well and who can also coordinate a team, you should weigh the writing skills relative to the other required skills. Consider writing skills, but don't stop there.
Even if you intend to rely on the grant writer to handle the bulk of the writing, writing skills will play a larger role, but they won't be the only skill required to get the proposal ready for submission. The grant writer will still need to manage timelines, interpret the funder's guidelines, and coordinate her work with the person preparing the budget.
How can you determine if someone can write well and handle the other parts of the process? In addition to requesting writing samples and confirming proficiency with Microsoft Word, you can include questions that address the project coordination and information management aspects of the role. Examples of questions to ask include:
How have you managed your work in past positions? Have you used an information management system to coordinate your work with team members?
What is your experience working with teams and managing a team effort?
Have you written grants before? If so, were you hired just to write the grant application, or were you also involved in determining where to submit applications?
Was it your role to develop the proposal calendar and manage the process, or was that done by someone else?
3. Believing Grant Writers Need to Be Subject-Matter Experts
The role of the grant writer involves at least as much, and possibly more, in facilitating content development as in creating content.
Just as "What is your success rate?" is often asked of applicants for grant writing positions, organizations hiring grant writers may screen applicants based on their experience writing on a specific topic. They may value subject-matter experience over other experience—even significant grant-writing experience—and eliminate candidates who have not written grants on a particular topic or submitted them to specific foundations. This impulse is understandable. If a grant writer has subject matter experience, it is clearly an added benefit. However, it isn't necessary for a grant writer to be a subject-matter expert to do her job well. Eliminating candidates simply because they haven't written grants in a particular field or for specific funders can result in someone being passed over who could be a great fit for the job.
Subject-matter experience is important but not essential, as hiring a grant writer does not eliminate the need for the organization's leadership and staff to participate in proposal development. An organization cannot outsource the entire grant writing process to a grant writer. The grant writer can help articulate the organization's message and ideas and put its plans in writing, but the organization's staff will remain the primary source of the proposal's content.
In addition to asking applicants whether they have submitted grants to specific funders or have experience in a specific field, an organization should also assess their ability to listen and collaborate. Helping staff to articulate their organization's history, direction, and goals will require these skills. The grant writer should be able to tell the organization's story, but without engagement from the organization's leadership and staff, that story could end up—sometimes inadvertently—more fiction than fact.
Questions to ask an applicant to complement questions about subject-matter expertise include:
If you work with us as a grant writer, you will write proposals about a subject area you may not be familiar with. If we hire you, what steps would you take to ensure the proposal is accurate and reflects our work?
Proposals can require the contributions of many people. In your past work, how have you handled narrative voice and made a proposal cohesive?
The Grant Writer is a Team Member
Relying too heavily on the assumptions above when hiring a grant writer can eliminate qualified applicants from consideration.
A grant writer cannot create grant proposals without significant input from staff. While the staff's proposal workload may decrease with a dedicated grant writer on board, the organization's leadership and staff must still participate in proposal development and should expect to do so. Hiring someone who can work well in a collaborative environment and help others articulate their ideas is more important than finding someone who has written grants for a specific funder or on specific topics.
Second, a grant writer should have strong writing skills, but she doesn't need to be a professional writer. At least as important as writing skills, and arguably more important than subject-matter expertise, is the ability to work with others and help the organization tell its story persuasively and cohesively.
Third, the grant writer's success rate is not a good indicator of her work. To determine whether someone is a good candidate for a grant-writing position, ask questions to assess knowledge and ability to perform the work. Grant writers work as part of a team, and their success rate reflects the team's performance.
Most grant writers have been asked at some point to “massage” unfavorable facts into preferred ones, or have seen their fact-based prose reworked by others into something that has the essence of truth but is not strictly true, or is at least less transparent. To some, this may sound like business as usual and what you need to do to win a grant. However, these little acts of truth-stretching, which can take the form of exaggerations, omissions, and misrepresentations, can exact a cost.