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 After all, I have my own way of doing things and I think most grant writer training is obsolete if not downright self-serving and counterproductive.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.

Direct Strike: Introducing Lightning Fast Grant Writing | Urgent

In the nonprofit world, we often talk about the importance of speed. How quickly can we get this project done? How quickly can we reach our goal? But when it comes to grant writing, many organizations seem to take their time. Unfortunately, this can lead to missed opportunities and funding gaps. In this blog post, we will introduce you to Lightning Fast Grant Writing – a new service that can help your organization write grants quickly and efficiently. So why wait? Contact us today to learn more by calling 949-338-5921 or clicking on the following link.

APPLY NOW!

Lightning Fast Grant Writing is a new company with a bold promise: We will write 200 tailored applications per year for the same cost as a regular, full-time grant writer! This system is uniquely designed to produce high volume with excellence and RESULTS.

After all, when was the last time you had to write a grant proposal on short notice? How did it go? In today's competitive grant climate, proposals must be finely crafted and submitted with all due haste. This can be a daunting prospect, especially when your organization doesn't have a dedicated grants department. But what if there were a way to speed up the process, and make grant writing practically effortless? With Lightning Fast Grant Writing, there is. 

Check out our new website for more details by clicking on Lightning Fast Grant Writing. 

Planning Your 2021 Grant Writing: How to Make Next Year Better Than the Last

When we discuss ideas for Lightning Fast Grant Writing, we sometimes forget to mention the power and speed that comes from simply planning ahead.

For example, one of the tasks we recommend for grant writers to get done in the month of December is to chart out the due dates for their most important grant applications.

Often you can find out the upcoming deadlines by reviewing the websites of your most important funders. We like to take that information and add it to an Excel spreadsheet that is organized in chronological order. It also works to put everything into Outlook too. You can even set up tasks to remind you to work on those particular grants ahead of time.

Ideally, these due dates can also be included in your overall fundraising planning calendar so that everyone in your fundraising department, or administrative staff, knows what to expect in the year ahead.

Although it may not be possible to pick exact dates for upcoming federal or state grant competitions, you can often guess when these grants will be available simply by checking on your prior year's experience and assuming the government funders will follow the same rough schedule in the coming year too.

How Do You Learn a New Craft? The Idea of 10,000 Hours of Practice.

Ultimately, there is no secret to picking up a new skill. As Malcolm Gladwell has written, if you invest about 10,000 hours in practicing it you will get to be world class at it. I certainly found that was true of my foray into the field of oil painting. It took me about 2,000 hours of practice - over the last 10 years - until I started hearing that folks were interested in buying and displaying my paintings. In the field of grant writing, however, most of us cannot afford to invest 10,000 hours in learning this craft. Typically, we have a grant due in the next week and we need to get it done to keep our jobs or our charity afloat.

I was in a similar situation back in 1996 when I took a job at an anti-child abuse agency called Family Solutions in Santa Ana, CA. I took my second grant writing class from Carol Gueisbauer at the Volunteer Center of Orange County. When I took her class, I followed one of the tricks I learned as a graduate student at Cornell University. I followed her directions exactly, even the directions that seemed silly and pointless. I did not argue or quarrel with her philosophy or methods, I gave her the benefit of a doubt and followed them exactly. Eventually, I taught along side her at a seminar at University of California - Irvine and by then I had evolved my own unique approach, my Lightning Fast method. But I never forgot how much I learned from her by doing everything she said including going after local foundations first. I had ended up making $100,000+ for my employer by following her techniques. 

In addition to compliance with a noted authority, I also found it extremely useful to obtain and review copies of successful winning grants. In this regard, I remember being startled at the extent to which the winning grants in my possession made extensive use of charts. This is a technique that I still use today with great impact. I don't think I would have figured that trick out or employed it so effectively early on in my career if I had not gone out of my way to check out winning grant proposals from similar agencies. 

Another one of my secrets of success was simply to dive in and start writing grants. In the process, I picked up many of the skills that still work for me today and that I enjoy teaching others, including my never rewriting a draft the same day I write it, infusing my writing with a sense up urgency and economy, and being careful to answer each element of the funder's questions. To be sure, I cannot share everything I know about training new grant writers in this space, but I think I have given you the most important basics as they work for me: 

• Identify a great teacher.
• Rely on multiple sources of information.
• Pay attention and follow the resource's instructions even if they strike you as silly. 
• Take action and make as many attempts as you can quickly to build your skill level. 

Finally, please do not hesitate to call me or e-mail me if you are stuck. I enjoy helping out anyone with an interest in grant writing. You are never alone in this business. 

Setting Up a Grantsmanship Library to Speed Up the Application Process

The process of grant writing quickly exposes you and your charity to a "survival of the fittest" environment.  Ironically, you will be harming yourself and your charity if you spend too much time grant writing, get too perfectionistic, or drag out the process too long. Thus, one of the most important secrets of grant writing is to recognize that you are in a dangerous spot and to get through it as quickly as possible.  One of the biggest problems I see in the field of grant writing is that very few people are timing how long it takes them to write a grant.  If more of us - me included - did a better job measuring the length of time needed to produce a full-proposal, then I think we would be more likely to look for new technology, short-cuts, and other tricks of the trade to speed up our grant writing.  In my case, for example, I found a lot of practical wisdom in the traditional tenets of the grant writing literature...but only after I reinterpreted these recommendations as tools for saving time.  One of the most important techniques I use as a grant writing consultant is to create a "grantsmanship" library for each client.  In this library, I collect - ahead of time - the key documents that will be needed as part of a hard-copy or on-line grant application.  These documents include copies of the agency's 501 ( c ) 3 determination letter, their IRS 990 form, a list of their Board members, their annual audit, and resumes for the Executive Director and key program officers.  I put these items in files, agency by agency, and then place them in a filing cabinet that is within easy reach. My rule is that the more often I use something, the closer I store it next to me.  As I like to demonstrate in the Grant Writing Fundamentals class, I want to see the grant writer's chair right next to the grantsmanship library.  Below, I'm including an excerpt from my, "A Really Great Booklet on Grant Writing," which indicates the elements of a grantsmanship library: Link to List of Elements for Your Grantsmanship Library Your ability to move quickly in a crisis - to act decisively - will be favorably influenced by this simple practice of organizing your key materials ahead of time.  If you do not yet have a grantsmanship library, please do yourself a favor and get started on it now.  I think you'll be glad you did.

Dr. Drew Says Reduce Your Risks By Working with a High Speed Grant Writer

What are the advantages of assigning the first draft to the high speed grant writer?

You can produce more grants, you can provide your team with more time to perfect the grant applications, like a race car driver your own attention is focused more completely under high speed grant writing, high speed means the final document will most likely reflect a natural consistency based on your current state of mind, you can move quickly when money becomes available, you can reduce risks by addressing the reasonable challenges and potentially unwarranted fears which might keep you from even attempting to produce a grant application.

Moreover, it is more fun and less of a chore. You'll be able to take advantage of the full capacity of your brain's intuition, memory, associations and your innate artistic sensibility. In my view, the challenge of high-speed grant writing is all the more interesting and easier to teach because it becomes a physical and not and intellectual skill.

Secrets of High Speed Grant Writing: Use Voice Recognition Software

I want to introduce you to the incredible power of voice recognition software is a key tool for speeding up the grant writing process. It is very difficult to do this sort of work on a high-speed basis if you are not able to dictate what you're doing, or to record your dictation and quickly download it into print. I write like I'm in the middle of a hurricane to gain sharper focus and urgency.

Secrets of High Speed Grant Writing: Start at the Beginning and Produce an A to Z First Draft

Once you have your voice recognition software in place, I think it is helpful to create a first draft of the entire grant application from A to Z - in that order. Save time by starting at the beginning each time.

Secrets of High Speed Grant Writing: Write First, Then Do Your Research

I'm a little rough in the first draft. I create dummy numbers. I fill in all the blanks with the expectation that the staff will refine the document with the exactly correct numbers based on their experience. My technique is to do my writing first and then doing my research afterwards. This speeds up things by allowing me to research only the information that is relevant to the grant. In this sense, I think it pays to create a quick first rough draft because it forces you to digest the grant application requirements from A to Z. This process of actively answering the questions forces you to read all the questions and to get up to speed on the realistic requirements for a more polished grant application.

Secrets of High Speed Grant Writing: Write for an Overwhelmed Reader


In my workshops, for example, I explain that I'm writing for the hung over intern who is facing severe emotional problems. You can assume the reader is overwhelmed by late night hours, crushed by too much to read even as the reviewer is comforted by too much to drink. I write very clearly simply and cleanly. I point out the obvious connections between my answers and the written questions I'm responding to. It is essential to initiate work on the budget concurrently with the grant application. The tired grant reader may simply not read the proposal and just jump to the budget.

Secrets of High Speed Grant Writing: Apply the Golden Rule to Your Own Grant Writing

Ultimately, the high speed grant writer needs to write what makes sense to the high speed grant writer. If you are not sold on the grant, then it is likely the funder will not be sold on the grant either. You know you are on the right track when you get the feeling that you know why they have to fund your grant application. There is not enough time to go back and forth and interview your team and ask them what they think. There is not enough time in the world for the team to debate and decide every issue. There are too many unknowns. Ultimately, the best thing to do is to trust yourself. That is to trust your intuition and to deliver product that makes sense to you. The Golden Rule works because it is a decision-making tool in a world of constrained rationality. It is a rule that will allow you to gain greater decisiveness over time.

A Fresh Look at the Wonder of Lightning Fast Grant Writing

When you have a long string of successes, I think it is easy to start thinking that everything you do – whether rational or not – is worth sharing with an audience.  I guess I'm sensitive to this issue, in part, because I just returned from a visit to the mixed results on display at the San Francisco Musuem of Modern Art. (See the YouTube video below.) Accordingly, I’m scaling back to the things I believe, objectively, will make the most difference for you.

This is because you can gain enormous advantages by learning how to write grants quickly and understanding that you need to properly use a team of people to create a winning grant application. In the next few posts, I want to leave you with 6 to 7 simple, easy-to-remember techniques that you can apply right now or when you go back to work, techniques that will allow you and your team to begin benefiting from this increased grant productivity immediately.

As you may know, I had an early talent in high speed writing. I have a PhD in political science, and one of my claims to fame is that I wrote my doctoral dissertation in about half the time spent by most graduate students. I was also surprisingly effective in working with my doctoral committee as I gradually won them over to my ideas. I think the evidence shows I did a good job too. My dissertation won the William Anderson Award from the American Political Science Association. I have been a professor at Williams College - the number one liberal arts school in the nation according to U.S. News and World Report. I know I was not the brightest graduate student in the nation. Nevertheless, I was the one applying these same lightning fast grant writing and team management techniques I’ll be sharing with you in these posts. I have applied this model to help produce $2.1 million in successful grants for the Coast Community College District (CCCD) and to compile an outstanding record that includes a 90% success rate.

Accordingly, I'm going to cover the most important techniques that have made the biggest difference for me including defining the proper role and timing needed for getting the most from the grant writer, the optimists, the pessimists, the budget preparer, and the proofreader.

Lightning Fast Grant Writing Tips: Give Your Charity an Advantage by Starting on Your Budget Early

One of the most important things I like to teach in my Lightning Fast Grant Writing Workshops is the suggestion that charities should start working on their project budget right away.

Too often, charities work on their budget at the last minute. They will only focus on the budget after they have written much of the grant which is odd, when you think about it, because the grant writer would have a better idea of what to write if there was a realistic budget to work off of...

Ironically, busy grant reviewers will often skim (or not read at all) the text of the charity's grant application and instead turn to the budget to make an informed decision about whether the charity has a clear enough plan and a realistic understanding of their proposed project. In this context, it is easier to understand why a strong, detailed, accurate budget will always give an agency an unfair advantage over its competition.

One of the best ways to get started on your budget is to work off of a copy of an existing, winning budget. You can obtain copies of winning budget examples from other agencies, off of the internet, or from your own agency's previous grant applications.