LAGUNA NIGUEL, CA – As non-profit leaders compete for scarce grant funding, it makes sense for them to develop their skills at hiring great, productive grant writers. As a grant writing consultant, I work with a number of very talented grant writers. Working with them is humbling. I do have a system, a set of criteria that I review whenever I bring on a new person as a grant pilot or grant co-pilot.
My System
I have my own system, which is based, in large measure, on the strengths and weaknesses of my own personality. Mainly, I determine the strength of a grant writer according to my experience in working with them. This works for me, in part, because I have spent a number of years as a college professor and I enjoy the teaching side of my work. But, I am also sort of stubborn about how I like to do things. I like having a dependable system in place. Lacking practical experience in working with someone, I have developed my own spin on the major factors that most of us use when evaluating applicants for grant writing positions: total dollar amount won, years of experience, level of education, and any grant writing courses and/or credentials.
For example, I do take into account the total dollar amounts the candidate has won so far. In contrast, I pay less attention to years of experience. I am doing this, in large measure, because I do not mind investing in their training and education. I have invested in grant writing courses and programs for staff members if they expressed an interest in them.
Applicants with an MA, MBA, or Ph.D. seem to do better at grant writing because it is a welcome sign of a candidate’s ability to read accurately, respond persuasively, and – of course – faithfully follow the funder’s directions. These are among the indispensable core skills of successful grant writing.
I do value education. Surprisingly, I am less interested in the subject matter the grant writer studied than in the level of education they have attained.
John C. Drew, Ph.D.
I am less sold on the value of courses and credentials. I work with grant writers simply based on their coursework or credentials. Part of the reason why I do this is that I think much of the traditional training for grant writers is dysfunctional, at least when it comes to doing grant writing fast enough to make it commercially viable.
Ultimately, I find myself bringing on grant writers who are enthusiastic and interested in learning more about Lightning Fast grant writing. Afterward, I pay careful attention to how a grant writer performs on an actual grant writing project. Based on working together, I get a clear view of that person’s true strengths and weaknesses. Here are the questions which become more serious as I spend time with them:
Do I feel at peace having them work with our clients on their own?
- Can they save us time?
- Does their work display creativity and inventiveness?
- Can they solve problems on their own without us hovering over them?
- Can they save us time?
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.
1. Differentiation By Total Dollar Amounts
To a large extent, the total dollar amount won by a grant writer is conflated with the number of years they have devoted to grant writing. At the very least, a grant writer who has won a ton of money shows that they enjoy the process of grant writing. It shows they are okay with key elements of the job including isolation, structure, the opportunity to design worthwhile projects, and the sense of being needed in a high-pressure, time-constrained situation.
However, 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 actually award-winning faculty who are experts in their respective fields.
Moreover, many research grants are quite large and relatively easy to win if you follow directions and have an interesting approach. Accordingly, grant writers who have won millions in grant money are not necessarily any better at grant writing than their peers who have won fewer total dollars. Instead, they have employers who give them access to high-value target-rich environments. 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?
2. Differentiation By Years of Experience
Common sense tells us that the years someone has spent as a grant writer must be another strong measure of their skill. This seems intuitively right. But is it?
I do know that the grant writers I have worked with who have experience are better and more dependable than the less experienced folks who are exploring grant writing as a career. In some ways, longevity in grant writing might be a proxy measure for identifying a highly skilled grant writer. One of the obvious reasons 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 or learn from. In addition, the longer someone has been a grant writer the more likely it is that they have developed good habits including a strong work ethic, proven contentiousness, dependable capacity to overcome writer’s block, and the willingness to do what it takes to hit a deadline. It is hard to imagine someone lasting in a grant writing role unless they have these qualities.
On the other hand, individuals with many years in grant writing can sometimes be stubborn, especially when it comes to trying out new methods and advanced technologies, particularly technical advances like voice recognition software. Nevertheless, if I intended to hire someone without planning to train them too, I would place more value on years of experience than the total dollars the grant writer has won.
3. Differentiation By Years of Education
Based on what I see when I am bringing on board new grant writers, I think it does pay off to work with people with high levels of education. Folks with college degrees seem to do better at it than folks without college degrees. Likewise, those with master’s degrees seem to outperform college graduates. Finally, folks with PhDs seem to outperform those with MAs.
Surprisingly, it does not seem to matter what field they took their degree in. It is possible that success in graduate school is actually an exact match with the skills most needed to succeed in grant writing including the ability to understand questions, to decern what someone is really expecting from them, and a strong capacity to make an argument backed up by appropriate supporting data and journal articles.
It may be that the skills needed to secure higher education are also associated with less well-known traits of truly great grant writers including how they score on five key, research-based personality traits known by the acronym OCEAN which stands for openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability. The bottom line is that when I bring on new people to Lightning Fast Grant Writing everything seems to work out better if they have at least a master’s degree.
4. 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. Although I have been happy – even honored – to issue certificates in grant writing, I have received 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 teaching bad habits that actually interfere with doing commercially successful grant writing.
Conclusion
I imagine that the non-profit leaders who are searching for heavy-weight grant writers will most likely look at all four of these differentiation measures and pick the candidates who score the highest on all four if they can find them. After all, if you rely on these basic, common-sense indicators, how could you possibly 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.