OK, now that I’ve been writing this post for nearly an hour, I can see that it’s going to need to be broken up into sort of a “tutorial series” on grant writing. We’ll call this Part I, wherein we examine how to choose good grant writing clients and where to start looking for funding. Tomorrow we’ll go into a little more detail on the process of applying for the grants themselves, and on Friday we’ll look at some of the common pitfalls that you’ll want to avoid.

I’m going to try really hard not to get too rant-y with this series, but I have to say up front that I just can’t make any promises. My intention is to build on Monday’s post “Six Ways to Get Started as a Freelance Writer” by going a little more in-depth on one of those suggestions. I really want this to be informative for you, the aspiring freelance writer, but it may come across as a one-woman tirade on why everyone and everything in the whole-wide world is stupid. If that happens, can we just go ahead and blame it on the fact that my pregnancy hormones know that I’m due in about seven days and call it good?

How to Write a Grant – Part I

If you’ve been looking around the web, you’ve likely noticed that there are a lot of grant writing jobs available; and you may just be really excited about trying your hand at crafting a grant proposal. I’ve actually been a professional grant writer in the past, and I can tell you that this is some of the most rewarding writing that you can do. There are tons of worthy organizations out there that could really benefit from the skills of a good freelance writer.

Where to Look

If you don’t have any experience grant writing, then it’s probably not a good idea to just jump in headfirst. This is a very complicated form of writing, and every single grant maker is going to be looking for something different. In general, you can expect the level of complexity to follow this pattern:

• Community Funds – Many businesses or local organizations have community funds from which they make grants from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. In many of these cases, the company only requires the applicant to fill out some forms about how they plan to use the money and how it’s going to make the organization look good to give it to them.
• Corporate Grants – These also come from businesses, but they’re often bigger and require more paperwork. Again, the company is going to want to know how funding this particular project is going to benefit them.
• Foundation Grants – Foundations are set up for the express purpose of giving away money. For that reason, everyone is asking them for it. They are going to have a long, involved proposal process that requires you to gather lots and lots of information from the client. This will be very labor intensive and time consuming, so plan accordingly.
• Government Grants – These are the most complex of all the grants. Government grants often take months to complete, and the amount of information you will need to gather and analyze on behalf of the organization is staggering. They are wonderful to receive, however, as they are often for big amounts and can have multi-year payouts.

What to Look For

Many of the people you meet will want you to write grants for things that just aren’t all that fundable. I blame that guy in the commercials with the green suit covered in question marks who keeps yelling that there are ka-zillions of dollars that the government is practically begging you to take off their hands in the form of grants. In case you had any doubts before now, this guy is full of it. Yes, there are a lot of grants available in the world, but the chances of your organization fitting just perfectly into the funder’s guidelines aren’t really all that great. Seriously, if it was that easy, why wouldn’t we just put the homeless up at the Ritz instead of scrimping to buy blankets for the local shelter?

That didn’t actually count as a rant, right?

Anyway, when you’re assessing your desire to write a grant proposal, one of the most important things you’re going to need to do is to make sure that the client (the one trying to get the grant) has a snowball’s chance in Hades of actually fitting the funder’s guidelines. Theoretically, this should be easy, as you would expect the client would have double checked this information before he offered to hire you. He didn’t. In fact, he probably hasn’t even identified a grant for which he wants you to apply. Most likely he’s got some great (or not) business idea, and he wants you to go out and find someone to give him $500,000 of free money to start it up.

Here’s my two cents’ worth: Don’t bother with this guy, especially if you are new to grant writing. Yes, there are grants available to help you start a business, but they’re few and far between. There are plenty of legitimate non-profit organizations vying for funds that you don’t need to waste your time trying to track down something that likely doesn’t exist for someone who wasn’t willing to take the time to do the research and discover that it doesn’t exist. In my experience, the vast majority of funders are going to want your client to prove that he already has an established nonprofit organization. This means that his 501(c)(3) designation has already been made by the government, and that he most likely already had other forms of revenue that allowed him to start the organization.

When this type of client approaches you, he will likely have some ideas as to where you might want to look for grants, if he doesn’t already have a particular one in mind. If not, then you can certainly charge him for your research time as you narrow down the possibilities for the organization. In fact, you definitely should.

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at the steps you need to take in actually applying for a grant on your client’s behalf.

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