As non-profit leaders compete for scarce grant funding, it makes sense for them to develop their skills at picking the grant writers they work with on sensitive projects. As the owner of a grant writing company, I have a powerful need to make the right decisions about who I hire and bring on as an associate grant writer.
Consequently, non-profit leaders may be curious to know how I identify heavy-weight grant writers.
My System
I have my own system, which is based, in large measure, on the strengths and weaknesses of my own personality. I have absolute trust in my abilities as a teacher. I also have my own way of doing things, the Lightning Fast way. Nevertheless, I do consider the major, obvious factors, that quickly come to mind when evaluating candidates for grant writing positions: total dollar amount won, years of experience, level of education, and any grant writing courses and/or credentials.
I have my own spin on all these factors. For example, I do look at the dollar amounts the grant writer has won so far. In contrast, I pay much less attention to years of experience.
I do look at the individual’s level of education. I am doing this, in part, because their level of education is an indicator of their IQ. Surprisingly, I find I am less interested in the subject matter they studied than in the level of education they have attained. I value higher education, that is those with an MA, MBA, or Ph.D. because I know earning a graduate degree is a great measure of someone’s level of independent, unsupervised discipline. It is also a good proxy for the candidate’s ability to read accurately, and faithfully follow the funder’s directions. After all, these are indispensable core skills of successful grant writing.
I completely disregard courses and credentials. I think everyone should study and master them, but I would not hire grant writers based on their coursework or credentials. After all, I have my own way of doing things and I think most grant writer training is obsolete if not downright self-serving and counterproductive.
For much the same reasons, I am reluctant to hire someone simply because they have taught a grant writing class. I do, however, make an exception if they have published a book on grant writing. (Those people are heavy-weight grant writers through and through.)
One other thing I should point out is that as an employer, I am looking for cost-effective grant writers. As such, I like to hire extremely talented young people, picking them for their enthusiasm and willingness to learn. I do not mind bringing them on and teaching them grant writing if I am confident, they have a great attitude, and are interested in what I must teach them.
Ultimately, however, I keep people on board largely because of the results they produce. Before Lightning Fast Grant Writing retains or promotes a grant writer, I ask myself a few simple questions:
Can we trust them to work with our clients on their own?
Can they solve problems on their own without me hovering over them?
Can they save us time and expenses?
So, for better or worse, I identify heavy-weight grant writers by their actual performance working with me. Why exactly do I do it that way? Here are my more detailed thoughts on the topic.
Differentiation By Total Dollar Amounts
Personally, I do not think it is fair to compare grant writers according to the amount of money they have won. This is because I have seen people with only modest skills bringing in millions of dollars simply because they work at a large academic research institution. Frequently, the main authors of these grants are award-winning faculty members who are experts in their respective fields.
Moreover, in my experience, many educational grants are quite large and are easy to win if you know what you are doing. In my view, people who have often won millions in grant money are not necessarily any better at grant writing than peers who have won fewer total dollars. Instead, they have employers who give them access to high-value target-rich environments. People who specialize in government grants will almost always be able to show massive grant totals simply because of the nature of their work.
I am no different. I have a client that wins almost $20 MM a year. They like having me as their grant writer. For the most part, they are expected to win $20 MM every year no matter what because they are a high-quality, government-funded program located in an area of great need. Although I like seeing the total dollar amounts of the grants I have written go up and up by $20 MM a year, I know in my heart that this does not mean I am a more skilled grant writer than someone who is working for a homeless shelter bringing in $250,000 per year.
If the dollar amounts you win are largely dependent on where you work, then we need to ask ourselves is there a better way to measure the quality of a grant writer?
Differentiation By Years of Experience
Common sense tells us that the years someone has spent as a grant writer might be another strong measure of their skill. This seems intuitively right. But is it?
I do know that the grant writers I hire who have experience are better and more dependable than the less experienced people who are exploring grant writing as a career. In some ways, longevity in the field of grant writing might be a proxy measure for the qualities that would make one grant writer better than another. One of the obvious reasons for this is that an experienced grant writer may have seen similar situations before and now they can more efficiently solve a similar challenge. They may even have useful templates they can recycle.
Among the obvious reasons for relying on experience in judging a grant writer would be that the longer someone is in the grant writing profession the more likely it is that they have developed good habits including a strong work ethic, proven contentiousness, capacity to overcome writer’s block, and a basic ability to write well enough that a client invites them to come back and write some more.
In many ways, the total dollar amount won by a grant writer is conflated with the number of years they have devoted to grant writing. Longevity is interesting to me because it indicates, at some basic level, that the applicant enjoys grant writing. They like the isolation, the structure, the challenge, the ability to influence projects, and the sense of being needed in a high-pressure, time-constrained situation.
All in all, I think years of experience are an indicator of a heavy-weight grant writer than the total amount of money they have won. On the other hand, individuals with many years in the field of grant writing can sometimes be stubborn when it comes to applying new methods and advanced technologies. Nevertheless, if I intended to hire someone without planning to train them too, I would value years of experience over the total dollars won.
Differentiation By Years of Education
Based on what I see when I am hiring grant writers, I think it does pay off to hire people with high levels of education. Years of schooling is correlated with greater skill in grant writing. Folks with college degrees seem to do better than folks without them. Likewise, those with master’s degrees seem to outperform college graduates. Finally, folks with PhDs seem to outperform those with MAs.
Again, it does not seem to matter what field they took their degree in. It is possible that getting a degree is an exact match with the skill sets that matter the most to grant writing including the ability to understand and answer questions, the ability to decern what someone else is expecting, and the ability to follow directions.
It may also be that securing a degree is also associated with less well-known traits of great grant writers including an interest in learning new subjects, the ability to work alone for extended periods of time without direct supervision, a high level of conscientiousness, and a strong mastery of academic style writing, that is supporting basic arguments with facts and statistics. At Lightning Fast Grant Writing, I seem to make better hiring decisions when I bring on people with at least a master’s degree.
Differentiation By Courses and Certificates
It is possible that people who have completed the most grant writing courses or achieved the most grant writing certificates are the best grant writers. Here, I may be a bit prejudiced. I have only attended three grant writing courses over my lifetime. One was at the Grantsmanship Center, another was at the Volunteer Center of Orange County, and the third was offered by the Foundation Center. All three of them were awful. The first taught me to research using a commercially available database, the second taught me to go after local funders, and the third taught me that some instructors do not like it if you ask questions even if they told you they did not mind if you asked them. Although I have issued certificates in grant writing, I have never actually earned one myself.
I tend to devalue courses and certificates mainly because the most important skills being taught might not show up in the individual’s day-to-day work. Even worse, they may be stuck with bad habits that interfere with doing commercially viable grant writing.
Conclusion
I imagine that the non-profit leaders who are searching for heavy-weight grant writers will most likely add all these measurements together and pick those who score the highest on the whole package. After all, if you rely on every conceivable standard of measure, how could you go wrong? In my next article, I will write about how you can go wrong with this approach and what we can do to objectively improve our measurement of grant writing skills.
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