Grant Writing: It Takes an Army

“Always do more than is required of you.” - George S. Patton

The Angels for Angels team frequently has individuals and organizations asking us for advice on grant writing. It is a topic we have blogged about often giving some guidance and tips, and yet there remains an abundance of topics to discuss since people find the process intimidating and daunting. 

“How do I do something I’ve never done?” 

“Am I doing it right?”

“How do I know if what I did is any good if I haven’t received any funding yet?”

Those are some of the worries that plague prospective writers when tackling the process of grant writing. But like many things, always focus on the process, not the goal. 

When grant writing appears to be a monumental task, whether you’ve been doing it for a while or you are doing it for the first time, it’s time to look at the process you’re expecting or that you’ve been doing to see if it’s the most effective and efficient way of handling it. 

While it is possible to write a grant as a single author, this is not the most efficient way because it becomes a beast of burden. Some of the best practices we’ve found are when it is a team effort to write a grant, with people being delegated a specific duty to be able to prepare a grant. 

In my old office in a previous organization, at a minimum, it took two people to prepare a grant: one person to write the draft, one person to proof it and fact check everything, and then you had still others informally participating in the process by individually reviewing, critiquing, and even contributing their feedback or more to improving the draft. 

The reason for multiple people involved in the process is because each person has unique and individual personalities and attention spans. If one person finds it boring, another finds it too wordy, or another finds it too curt, then the combined feedback means that the document could benefit from cutting its length down and balancing the technical information with the call to action, or the emotional appeal. 

Here’s a mental image, which is not a 1:1 recreation of the military hierarchy, but useful for the general idea: 

Your Commader-in-Chief is the CEO or whomever signs off on all documents. They know the requirements and goal, they see the big picture, the relationships at stake, and the sense of urgency to achieve their aims. The Commander-in-Chief knows his or her organization and its departments, staff, advocacies, relationships internally and externally, and thus is responsible for everything that goes on, for better or worse. He or she signs off on all grant proposals because it meets his or her standards and expectations, which also represent the organization’s as well.

Your Generals are the managers for their respective departments, such as HR, Communications, and Accounting. Under their leadership, they know exactly what their responsibilities are and aren’t, as well as what they can and can’t do when it comes to any proposed actions or programs. A Communications manager will coordinate with the Accounting manager to see if there is a budget or not, and advise for or against anything, pending final approval from the CEO and Board of Trustees. They are the ones who set guidelines and deadlines for the grants, and have authority over what could or should be included or excised from a draft.

Under them, you have Majors and Captains, who are assigned projects or make their own proposals. These are the ones who are responsible for writing and revising grants. 

Lastly, you have Lieutenants, the ones who assist the Majors and Captains, such as volunteers or interns, or anyone regardless of hierarchy volunteering their time and insight to research possible donors, peer review drafts and give feedback, or offer additional material such as preparing indexes that includes statistics, graphs, citations, and images to support what the grant writers (Majors and Captains) have drafted. 

What you see here in this hierarchy and breakdown is the delegation of responsibilities for writing a grant. 

Here’s another thing: you can play each and every role by yourself when you break down the grant writing process into phases. 

When you roleplay the Commander-in-Chief, you have to know your organization and its staff, along with your constituents and prospective donors inside out. When you roleplay the General, you have to know your existing resources, limitations, and needs. When you roleplay the Major, you write the draft of the grant itself. Finally, when you are the Lieutenant, you are getting the supporting information and research put together to supplement your draft. 

You can play these roles by yourself, and you can even fulfill multiple roles just like your colleagues can at times wear different hats during different parts of the grant writing process. 

Victory is achieved not by securing funding from a grant, but having a smooth operation for streamlining your grant writing process, which comes from exceptional organization.