May 19, 2004 | Read Time: 7 minutes
The faxed advertisement that arrived at Citizens Who Care, a nonprofit group in Davis, Calif., that provides services for the elderly, promised grant-proposal-writing training that would result in thousands of dollars in revenue for charities.
But Julie Bornhoeft, the group’s executive director, spotted a problem with the advertisement immediately.
The trouble, she says, is that the ad said that proposal writers could collect a percentage of the grants they won, which is considered an unethical practice among nonprofit groups and foundations. “To do that means you’re padding the budget and you’re misrepresenting the cost of your program to the funder,” Ms. Bornhoeft says. However, she notes, to an inexperienced grant-proposal writer who doesn’t know any better, a percentage commission as payment for winning a grant may seem perfectly appropriate.
Grant-proposal writers learn their craft in a number of ways: Students travel hundreds of miles and pay hundreds of dollars for weeklong training sessions offered by for-profit and nonprofit organizations; they take free, one-day seminars through local nonprofit-management centers; or they dive headfirst into proposal writing with only the help of the Internet and, perhaps, a good editor. Each of these methods has its place, but potential students should make sure that the training they receive is ethical and appropriate to their needs. This becomes more difficult as the number of opportunities for training keeps increasing. Here, some experts on proposal writing give hints on finding the best instruction in writing grant proposals.
Judging the Fit
It is important to make sure a proposal-writing class is a good fit for a nonprofit organization, says Ms. Bornhoeft. About nine years ago, at the beginning of her career, she took a weeklong, eight-hours-per-day class held in New Mexico by the Foundation Center, a New York City organization that offers classes on grant seeking nationally. The class cost hundreds of dollars, and the women’s shelter in Montana where she then worked picked up the tuition, as well as her travel and hotel expenses. “In hindsight,” she says, “it may have been more than I needed right off the bat.”
The key word, she says, is scale: Consider the size of the organization for which the proposals will be written, and what kind of work will be required. “A smaller organization that is doing local civic-group applications, maybe smaller United Way proposals, that type of thing, does it require weeklong training? I don’t think it does,” says Ms. Bornhoeft. “If you are moving your way up through an institutional advancement office at a college, or you’re working for a health-care organization where you may be applying on a national scale, then I absolutely think you need that level of training. It depends on the situation.”
It is important that training programs focus on issues relevant to nonprofit groups in different states or regions, says Terry Gunnell, who teaches grant-proposal writing at the Nonprofit Resource Center of Alabama, in Birmingham.
For instance, because Alabama is so poor, he says, many nonprofit groups there seek grants from organizations outside the state. Charities in other states, he says, may have other priorities. “The kind of grant writing a person in California would do in terms of local proposals or national proposals is going to be radically different than the kind of writing a person in Alabama would do,” he says. “You want to localize your instruction as much as possible.”
In addition to local training programs providing a focus on regional concerns, Mr. Gunnell says, they can also give participants the opportunity to strengthen their network of local nonprofit peers. “As much as anything else,” he says, “the classes are good for skills building and for making connections.”
Many proposal-writing classes allow students to work on a grant proposal during the class. This approach works well for people who have a specific project in mind, because they can come away from the class with a completed draft, says Kate West, who teaches proposal-writing classes at Metro Volunteers, a center in Denver that connects charities with volunteers and provides training.
“It’s one thing to read a book or to go to a class and get the information,” she says, “but I find that my students get the absolute most out of doing. And to be able to work on a project and bring it back the next week and get feedback on it. My evaluations say over and over again that that is the most helpful thing about the class.” Most of her students, she says, are not freelance or first-time writers, she says, but nonprofit staff members who have not won grants in the past and need some feedback on their mistakes.
Ethics and Professionalism
When choosing a training program, prospective students need to examine the instructor’s ethics, says Phyllis Renninger, president of the American Association of Grant Professionals, an online network with headquarters in Kansas City, Mo.
“We have a code of ethics on our Web site, and I would weigh whatever is being taught in any course against that,” Ms. Renninger says. She echoes Ms. Bornhoeft’s assessment that any trainer who says grant-proposal writers can make a percentage commission based on the grants they win is encouraging an unethical practice, and should be avoided. The Association of Fundraising Professionals also has a code of ethics instructing members not to collect a percentage of charitable funds raised as payment.
Additionally, Ms. Bornhoeft says, a discussion of ethics should be included with the training. When she teaches proposal-writing courses, she says, she discusses the commission issue, as well as a proposal writer’s responsibility to the foundation or corporation providing money. Nonprofit organizations, she says, maintain integrity with a grant maker by using its money as they promised in their proposals.
It is also considered good form to follow up with grant makers on the progress of the programs they support, says Ms. West. “I find that a lot of nonprofits, once they get the check, if there’s no report required they don’t even write a report,” she says. “My preference is to do quarterly reports for all funders, just a one-page letter saying what’s been happening. At the very least, each funder who writes you a check should get a letter a year later, a report a year later, whether they ask for it or not.”
Warning Signs
Some groups that offer training promise to “certify” grant-proposal writers. Proposal-writing experts say students of these classes should be aware that the certification isn’t an objective measure of their abilities. “I see the faxes all the time that say, ‘You take our class, you become a certified grant-writing expert or grant-writing professional, ‘” says Ms. Bornhoeft. “It’s basically a certificate of completion. And no one has any right, in my opinion, to declare someone certified in this when the individual taking that program probably has never written a proposal before. Suddenly there’s this seal of expertise that isn’t there.”
Some proposal writers say they are also skeptical of classes that depict proposal writing as a mysterious process.
“I joke in the class a lot that if you write one grant, you’re a grant writer, and if you write two, you’re an expert,” Mr. Gunnell says. “I mistrust trainers in anything who want to make the process a mystery. Grant writing is basically learning how to dissect the funders’ requirements, then learning how to match your interest up with theirs, and then following the rules.”
Additionally, says Ms. Bornhoeft, training doesn’t guarantee money or success for nonprofit organizations. “There’s this myth out there that if you simply learn to write a grant, there’s just oodles of money, and it’s available to anyone, and you’ll never have to do anything else again,” she says. “So many people come into the programs with this belief that, ‘Once I learn this secret handshake, all these doors are going to open and all my problems are solved.’”
The truth is, say proposal-writing experts, there is no secret. Some say taking a class isn’t even necessary; many of today’s proposal writers had no formal training at all.
But Ms. Renninger says that while classes aren’t essential, they are a definite help to proposal writers. “When I got into grant writing, there were no options,” she says. Self-teaching, she says, “was the way you became a grant writer. But I think we’re seeing a recognition of our profession as a valid profession, and so now we are going to start seeing [more] courses. Now we have more options for more people coming into it. It’s excellent.”
How did you learn to write grant proposals — and what do you feel is the best way for others to learn?
