I'm a successful full-time professional grantwriter. There are about 100 tricks in the book for standing out from the pack, though not all apply to all categories or instances of grants.
But no matter what type of grant it is, the biggest point I tell people is this:
You need a story.
All other aspects flow from that. (E.g. how effectively you can communicate the flow of logic in the writing, and other technical aspects which include much more than just the text boxes and what this blog summarily describes.)
Find that story, then it will rise above the pack. Most people want grant money but have no idea what it takes to get it.
Reminds me of academic papers. When I first started in academia I thought it was all about merit, results, and following a proper scientific process.
Turns out if you want to be successful, as measured by paper acceptances or citations, which is the standard metric used by universities and companies, it's all about being able to tell a good story to convince reviewers.
A well-told and convincing story can hide all kind of faults in your experiments or results. It's pretty much all you need.
When I started my PhD, I was quite surprised with everyone at the lab always talking about their "storyline" for their upcoming paper. It really is very important.
Having a good story isn't about hiding the faults in your work, it's about making your work accessible to others. It's no good having tons of experiments if you can't explain what they mean and why anyone else should care.
While that is true, the problem is that bad science is easily masked by telling a good story. When telling the story is more important than the science itself, you end up with more and more extravagant projects that always end in failure to achieve anything close to what was written in the grant application.
Can you clarify what you mean by "successful full-time professional grantwriter"?
Are you getting a higher-than average hit-rate of successful grants awarded? If so, what is that percentage (ie, what percentage of grant applications you write are awarded successfully?)
Or, by successful do you mean that you just do this full-time because you have many clients you work for?
Yes, higher than average success -ate (it can be a choice, really, as to your modus operandi - I choose to be more careful and targeted with what I apply to, but others choose to work at higher volume and accept a higher failure rate - I respect either choice we can all be a bit different), and yes I now have more clients demanding my work than I have time for. I increasingly focus my time on larger grants instead of small ones, but I still love doing tiny projects for a local community sometimes (kind of like pro bono) as this profession tends to be for the love of helping the community, at least in my case. I'm about mid-career at this stage.
I won't disclose my percentage rate but it's extremely high. Sometimes government grant programs close down 2 days after you submit a massive application to them, that happened to me last year. So is that a fail? Not sure. How much you are granted is another thing though, about 50% of my grants don't get awarded the full amount applied for, it's extremely common.
I find this very fascinating. Just out of curiosity, how often to come across organizations that you would turn down if it was your decision to give them a grant? For whatever reason: wastefulness, greediness, or just plain pointless.
Actually the main reason is risk. I have a client right now with plenty of money to pay me that really wants me to do grants for them but they're not a quality client and I believe they will be turned down by most grantmakers and that's not how I work. They have some PR and governance issues.
There are also some clients (or grantmakers) that simply turn me off. Not common, but it happens. E.g. a certain kind of religious foundation only granting to those who contribute to their world view (with all respect to religion in general though), or a corporate foundation whose name I just don't feel like applying to (sorry McDonald's, you just leave a bad taste in my mouth).
It feels weird being part of mining companies (and philanthropists) paying funds to do good when what their source of money did was not good, but you weigh up the whole world and realise it's better sometimes to just help community projects happen, you've got to have balance somewhere.
Usually every grant project makes me tear up at least once, out of empathy to those I'm helping. That's what it's all about.
I respect your will to not disclose your success rate, but I'd like to point out that "extremely high" means exactly nothing to me.
A 30% success rate could be extremely high when applying for grants, or maybe for all I know an 80% success rate is what you get if you just make it up as you go along and you need to score above 95% to qualify for "extremely high". No way to tell one or the other from where I'm sitting.
If you don't know what the background success rate is, then why do you need to know what this commenter's success rate is? All you need to know is that it's significantly higher.
X has been a major problem since the beginning of time. Y, Z, and T have been tried, but little progress has been made, and we are stuck with X. Recently, in the context of V, the use of W has shown great success. Could W be the missing ingredient for solving X? Although this is a plausible and intriguing possibility, a number of technical issues (A,B, and C) need to be addressed before applying W to X.
After seeing more of how the sausage is made, I realized these stories are just like stories we tell ourselves in our personal lives. They are adjusted and readjusted retroactively after the fact. You often come up with an idea in a way that is not very narrative, may need a lot of very specific background knowledge of your and your team's circumstances and events. Then after the fact, after you came up with the idea and validated it, you place that piece of the puzzle into the big picture and make it fit seamlessly and flowing naturally from the past ideas and current zeitgeist in the field.
I thought OP's recommendation was for more of a personal story, e.g., "When my uncle was diagnosed with X, his doctors tried Y, Z, and T. Surprisingly, while these treatments are considered standard of care, their efficacy is low. Recent research points to V as a risk factor for X so..."
OK, I'll tell a common one. Grant programs are obsessed with 'new new new' (in terms of what projects they want to fund). I don't actually think it's a good thing, because if your well-established program addresses a genuinely important ongoing need in the community, it deserve funding no less than something just because it's new.
Nevertheless, it's an obsession among many grantmakers, so we have to deal with it.
Instead of forcing my client to come up a completely new 'innovative' project or program, you can build on your existing one while making it feel 'new':
- Introduce a new element to the project packaged as 'expansion' or 'growth', or a concepts like 'new target group' to bring in as benefices, where in reality it might be only 20% genuinely 'new work' for the client if the grant goes ahead.
- Then you give the application a snazzy title and use wording magic to change the perception of what's being proposed.
Right now I'm doing this trick for a client. Proposal will suggest that the grant funds the first 12 months' salary for a newly installed part-time volunteer coordinator to usher in a new era of program growth, and I'll call it 'seed capacity funding'.
Suddenly what they're funding is 'new', but it's a decade-old program.
I just gave something of real dollar value but I'm happy to trade it for Hacker News upvotes just this once. ;)
> I just gave something of real dollar value but I'm happy to trade it for Hacker News upvotes just this once. ;)
Happy to share an upvote :)
This is nice advice, but not exactly unknown. Have you spent much time on the grant reviewer side of the equation? It seems like literally every grant I've been part of writing involves the compromise and recasting in novelty that you're describing. I would expect many grants are using this approach to deal with the novelty obsession of funding bodies.
That's right, it's just common sense based out of experience.
Why people still need me - even after I can give 'free advice' like the above - is the stuff I have flowing through my blood and brain that others just don't. Grantwriting is a constant creative process. The 'source' of all my tricks I've collated is what I can produce, on-the-fly, in any new situation in the future. You have to have the personality. And I among others like me do. I'm not unique, but it's a pretty uncommon set of attributes you need to have. Obsessiveness and attention to detail (in every aspect of the job), sense of vision, empathy, sense of justice, your grammar and writing prowess, the willingness to jump through hoops (that's grants 101, I have stories to tell about that psychological requirement), hyper goal-based brain - that's all me. A lot of people would rather eat cardboard than go through all that.
So it's my niche. I thrive in this environment.
> Have you spent much time on the grant reviewer side of the equation?
I've spent some - it's not as fun as the challenge of applying to grants though - and it's been enough to know that everything I learned through years of being a grantwriter was confirmed when being a grants assessor.
People see through your cracks immediately. You really must be real (with what you say and in giving them what they want) if you want to have high chance of being funded.
But then every grantmaker type (corporate, govt, private philanthropic, club) has other factors, e.g. granting for 'PR' reasons instead of merit based on the guidelines. Certain private philanthropic bodies will have extremely specific attitudes and goals compared to others. It's a wide world. (Thankfully.) And there's a lot of money.
The only next question would be what country are you in? I've never applied for a grant outside my own country (actually I lie, but not often), and while I have plans to export my skills overseas in future, for now if our countries don't match I should get back to my existing clients. There are also some major legal or pseudo-legal industry differences across jurisdictions for grant-writers, which could be a problem.
Grantwriting is a skill. Writing grants requires a huge amount of time away from research. I'd love it if our group were able to have a grantwriter on staff, integrated with our research team. We would be able to get so much more science done, because our awesome researchers could do... research.
The whole enterprise of grantwriting is demonstrably a wasteful activity. Grant award decisions are largely due to historical reputation, nepotism and other sorts of special interest. The idea of outsourcing writing research plans to people who don't understand them to generate meaningless pages of feel-goodery is everything that's wrong with science today.
People who talk about "the skill of grantwriting" perpetuate this cycle of wasted intellect. Faculty at the top 5 laugh at how many faculty elsewhere are tricked into pursuing this quixotic idea.
But no matter what type of grant it is, the biggest point I tell people is this:
You need a story.
All other aspects flow from that. (E.g. how effectively you can communicate the flow of logic in the writing, and other technical aspects which include much more than just the text boxes and what this blog summarily describes.)
Find that story, then it will rise above the pack. Most people want grant money but have no idea what it takes to get it.