3 Tips to Maximize Your Partnership with a Grant Consultant

Establishing a clear budget, detailed program descriptions, and a long-term strategic plan will help maximize your partnership with a grant consultant. 

Partnering with a grant consultant is a strategic investment in your nonprofit organization’s future. You can maximize this investment by ensuring your grant consultant deeply understands your organization's needs and goals. In this blog post, I’ll review three tips for maximizing your partnership with a grant consultant. 

1. Develop a Clear Budget 

Have you accounted for your nonprofit's needs? A clear budget is a requirement of most grant submissions and is vital to a financially sustainable nonprofit organization. Developing a clear budget will help your organization reflect on its priorities and allocate resources appropriately. 

Your grant consultant will review your budget to deepen their understanding of your organization’s priorities and funding requirements. As a grant consultant, it’s our role to communicate what’s outlined in the budget in a concise needs statement that reflects the organization’s mission, vision, and programming priorities. 

Part of developing a clear budget is defining a grant revenue goal. A clear grant revenue goal will allow your grant consultant to develop an appropriate scope of work based on your organization’s funding needs. This goal will also allow you and your grant consultant to establish SMART goals that provide accountability to the budget. This encourages communication and collaboration between you and your consultant to reach the organization’s funding goals. 

In addition, a clear budget can help your grant consultant develop a grant strategy that reduces your organization's risk by diversifying funding sources and pivoting when funding falls through. 

2. Craft Detailed Program Descriptions 

Your mission and vision statements briefly describe your organization’s purpose. Crafting detailed program descriptions will help you communicate how your organization fulfills its mission. 

Your grant consultant will review your program descriptions to deepen their understanding of your organization’s programming and associated funding needs. Program descriptions will allow your grant consultant to tell the story of your organization’s impact and how the funding will be allocated to further the mission. 

As I covered in our previous blog, Data-Driven Reporting and Outcome Evaluation, funders are also interested in seeing the tangible impacts of your programming on the communities they serve. Therefore, it’s essential to develop clear metrics for your programming that can be used to demonstrate its impact to potential funders. Stories and data visualizations can help your grant consultant communicate your organization’s impact.

3. Create a Long-Term Strategic Plan

You likely have goals for your organization for the year ahead, but what about the next three to five years? Creating a long-term strategic plan will help your organization understand its future funding needs and plan for long-term funding success. 

Your grant consultant will review your long-term strategic plan to understand your organization’s vision and goals for the future. Your grant consultant will utilize your long-term strategic plan to develop a strategy to engage existing, past, and prospective funders to meet your goals and continue to fulfill your mission as your needs and programming evolve. 

In addition, a long-term strategic plan showcases your organization’s commitment to its future, inspiring confidence from funders. 

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In conclusion, establishing a clear budget, detailed program descriptions, and a long-term strategic plan will help maximize your partnership with a grant consultant by providing them with the information they need to achieve grant success. 

Interested in more tips to prepare your grant strategy? 

Our Interactive Grant Readiness Checklist will help you assess your grant readiness before investing in a grant consultant, including a comprehensive checklist, detailed assessment questions, and space to self-reflect and strategize. Use code “READY2024” to access the checklist for FREE through the end of the year.

Pitching a Grant Consultant to Nonprofit Leadership

Strategies for effectively presenting the case to hire a grant consultant to executive leadership.

You’ve defined your nonprofit's needs and identified a grant consultant as the key to unlocking financial sustainability and mission impact. Now, you need the support and approval from your executive leadership. In this blog post, we’ll share strategies for effectively presenting the case to hire a grant consultant to your nonprofit’s leadership. 

Position Hiring a Grant Consultant as a Strategic Investment 

A grant consultant can help your organization manage its grant program and approach funders confidently and consistently. This is a strategic investment in your organization’s future, providing financial sustainability through grant research, writing, and management.  

Take a holistic view of your organization, from mission and vision to strategic plan. Align your pitch with your organization’s strategic plan and showcase how a grant consultant can help your organization reach its goals. 

Highlight Your Nonprofit’s Grantseeking Challenges 

Ensure your executive leadership understands the internal challenges your organization faces. You are the expert in your organization's day-to-day challenges. Communicate these clearly and explain how they affect your organization’s ability to achieve mission impact and financial sustainability. Highlight the specific solutions a grant consultant can provide to address your organization's challenges.

Common challenges we see include time and capacity. These challenges can lead organizations to spend less time building relationships with funders, researching funding opportunities, and submitting funding requests. Deadlines may be missed, and crucial funding may be lost. These challenges can leave staff feeling overwhelmed and unsupported, which may cause staff turnover. 

Connect Your Challenges to Grant Consultant Solutions

When pitching a grant consultant, connect your specific challenges to the support a grant consultant provides. Remember, a grant consultant can do more than write grants for your organization. They can ensure staff have the tools and support to reach their full potential and strengthen their organization. 

Our comprehensive services ensure your organization has the tools, resources, and coaching to secure funding. Our services can save your organization time with efficient project management. We can increase your organization’s capacity by allowing staff to focus on executing mission-driven programming and services. We can help you identify new funding opportunities with access to cost-prohibitive prospect research tools. We can guide you on how to build relationships with funders. A grant consultant can address all of these challenges and more. 

Present the Cost of Hiring a Grant Consultant

Executive leadership is responsible for the organization's financial health. The cost of hiring a grant consultant will be a key concern of leadership. Root the cost of hiring a grant consultant in reality by obtaining proposals and vetting consultants.  

Depending on your position in the organization or relationship with executive leadership, you may require approval to begin conversations with grant consultants. These initial meetings are essential to build support from executive leadership throughout the discovery process by highlighting the true cost. Ask questions and gain perspective on what executive leadership would like to see from a grant consultant proposal and questions or concerns they may have. By understanding the priorities of executive leadership, you’ll be prepared to ask the right questions and identify the right consultant for your organization.

Learn the process of engaging a grant writer and find tips to prepare for each stage in our blog, Navigating the Process of Engaging a Grant Writer. 

Leadership will also benefit from understanding the consultant’s history of success. Request case studies, testimonials, and references to demonstrate the consultant’s effectiveness and the potential return on investment for your organization.  

For every $1 our clients spend, we raise $12 for their mission. 

A grant consultant can also be highly cost-effective for your organization, especially compared to the cost of hiring a grant writer as a full-time employee. This includes reduced overhead and benefit costs that can be a significant long-term investment. In addition, a consultant's flexibility allows your organization to respond quickly to funding needs and scale your contract up or down accordingly. 

Beyond the cost, establishing key performance indicators for the engagement will ensure leadership that you’ve considered success measures to ensure a fruitful partnership with clear goals.

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You recognize the impact a grant consultant can have on your organization’s financial future, advancing your grant program from research to submission. By following these steps, you can craft a compelling pitch that will resonate with your nonprofit leadership and clearly demonstrate the value of hiring a grant consultant. 

Showcase your understanding of the organization’s long-term goals and position a grant consultant as a strategic investment to help achieve them. Highlight the challenges your nonprofit currently faces and explain how a consultant can offer personalized solutions. Finally, present the cost and outline how you’ll measure the partnership's success to ensure the investment delivers tangible results.

With the approval of your nonprofit leadership, we’ll be excited to partner with you and help your organization Bloom. Contact us to learn how we can support your organization. 

Navigating the Process of Engaging a Grant Writer

A step-by-step guide to engaging a grant writer for nonprofit organizations

Engaging a grant writer can feel intimidating and overwhelming. Handing your grant program to someone outside your team requires deep trust and respect. Additionally, several layers of approval may be required to begin partnering with a grant writer. In this blog post, I will walk you through the process of engaging a grant writer and provide tips on preparing for each stage to help you navigate the process with confidence. 

Why Engage a Grant Writer

Like most nonprofit professionals, I’ve worn many hats. With several years of experience in executive leadership, fundraising, programs, and boards of directors, I understand the many hurdles organizations face in fulfilling their mission. 

Applying for grants is a time-consuming process and requires constant attention from prospect research, managing deadlines, relationship building with funders, grant writing, and reporting. It entails more than simply writing grants. Managing the process with limited capacity and greater organizational demands can be tedious. From research and practice, I know that resources are abundant, and acquiring a sustainable base of funders invested in your nonprofit's mission is possible. 

A grant writer can help your organization secure the funds it needs to bloom. Grant writers have a specialized skill set to harness grants as tools to strengthen organizations. Grant writers are excellent communicators and project managers who thrive in untangling the complexities of your organization’s work and developing clear, concise language to communicate its unique mission-aligned impact to funders. 

However, a grant writing consultant can do more than simply write grants for your organization. At Bloom Grant Consulting, we offer various services, including leading all grant writing efforts as your outsourced teammate, building new grant programs, developing content or boilerplate, creating grant trackers and calendars, researching and qualifying funders, coaching, and more. Our comprehensive approach ensures your organization has the tools, resources, and language to communicate with funders confidently and consistently. 

Explore the financial benefits of hiring a grant writing consultant versus a full-time, in-house grant writer in our blog, Unlocking Savings: Why Contracting a Grant Writer is a Cost-Effective Choice for Your Organization.

The Process of Engaging a Grant Writer

Define Your Organization's Needs

First, it’s essential to outline your nonprofit’s grant writing needs. 

Consider the following questions to define your organization’s needs: 

1. What is the status of your organization’s grant program? Are you approaching grants for the first time? Are you restarting after a prolonged period of inactivity? Are you actively applying for grants? 

2. How much support does your organization need with its grant program? Do you want a grant writing partner to manage your grants start-to-finish, or are you interested in support with research and strategy? 

3. What are your funding needs? 

4. Who will be the primary contact for your grant program? 

5. What is your budget for grant writing? 

6. Do you need organizational approval from executive leadership or the board of directors to contract a grant writer?

   
   

Research Grant Writing Consultants

You can find grant writers on various online databases. Nonprofit professional associations or organizations may have trusted recommendations for consultants. We are members of the Puget Sound Grant Writers Association and the Nonprofit Association of Oregon and can be found in their respective grant writer and nonprofit service provider directories.  

Consider the following when researching grant writing consultants: 

• History of success: The grant writer has a portfolio of existing or past clients and has delivered results. 

• Referrals or testimonials: The grant writer is recommended by existing or past clients who speak highly of their work.  

• Excellent communication: The grant writer exhibits strong writing skills and is responsive to your outreach. 

• Service options: The grant writer offers various services to meet your organization’s needs within budget.

• Compatibility: The grant writer aligns well with your team. 

Your organization may have additional priorities when hiring a grant writing consultant, including familiarity with your organization, mission space, or location. 

Similarly, grant writing consultants have priorities when evaluating potential nonprofit partners. Bloom Grant Consulting is excited to work with passionate nonprofit leaders who are ready to make an impact. We prefer to work with established nonprofit organizations with paid staff and two or more years of 990 filings. These nonprofit organizations have a solid foundation to secure and implement mission-driven services and programming supported by grant funding.   

Schedule Consultations with Select Grant Writers 

Once you’ve narrowed down your research, contact the grant writing consultants on your list to schedule consultations to learn more about how they can support you and your organization. 

During a consultation, be prepared to speak about your organization's mission, goals, objectives, budget size, team structure, and more. 

As grant writing consultants, we are focused on building successful and collaborative partnerships with organizations to ensure long-term sustainability and mission impact. This requires meaningful participation and communication. This meeting is an opportunity to get to know one another and ensure compatibility for a future partnership.

Establish a Scope of Work and Sign a Contract

Following a successful consultation, we’ll align a scope of work for your nonprofit organization, valid for two weeks. Once we’ve agreed on a scope of work, we’ll prepare a contract for your organization to formalize our engagement. Once a contract is in place, we’ll begin the discovery phase. 

Dive into Discovery

The discovery phase is just what it sounds like! It’s an opportunity for our team and your organization to lay the groundwork for our work together. We begin discovery by providing our clients with a document discovery checklist. 

These core materials will help our team understand your organization’s structure and financial foundation. Many of these documents lay the foundation for future grant applications we will submit in collaboration with your team. 

We understand that our clients may not have all of the documents on our list, so we provide indicators for what documents you have, what documents are in progress, and the ones you don’t have. We’re here to help you fill in the gaps! 

We give our clients two weeks to complete the checklist before we jump into a kickoff meeting. Our client kickoff meeting is about setting expectations. In the first half of the meeting, we review the agreed-upon scope of work and timeline. The second half of the meeting is an in-depth discussion of prospect research. We discuss what type of funding prospects are suitable for your organization. This conversation leads seamlessly into the research phase. 

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Our Grant Readiness Checklist can help your organization prepare for the discovery phase. 

At Bloom Grant Consulting, we are all about finding ways to help you reach your grant potential. This will help you assess your grant readiness before investing in a grant consultant, including a comprehensive checklist, detailed assessment questions, and space to self-reflect and strategize.

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Begin Research

Research is pivotal to our work at Bloom Grant Consulting. Whether assessing an organization’s grant preparedness or identifying funding prospects, we are meticulous in our research. We use public data, subscription-based tools, and our experience in the field to provide you with an organized matrix packed with information to help your organization confidently approach the right funders. 

Continue Based on Your Scope of Work

Once discovery and research are complete, we continue based on your organization’s unique scope of work. Throughout our engagement, this could include reviewing funding prospects, providing personalized training, one-on-one coaching, and more. 

Our process for ongoing support is custom-made for our nonprofit partners. We become an integrated member of your team, executing your grant to-do list. This service is for organizations that need a partner to increase their capacity for grant writing, develop a regular cadence of proposal submission, meet deadlines, and build authentic relationships with funders. These are long-term engagements with six- to twelve-month contracts. We meet with our ongoing support clients bi-weekly for one hour to review and discuss upcoming grant proposals, develop funder outreach strategies, and provide cultivation coaching. 

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Engaging a grant writer is like planting the seeds for your nonprofit’s growth. By defining your needs and carefully selecting the right grant writing consultant, you can cultivate a partnership to help your organization thrive.

Plant seeds for future growth. Contact us to schedule a free 30-minute consultation today. We’re excited to meet you, explore how we can nurture your mission together, and watch it bloom!