Real-Life Decision Making
Decision making comes into play at every step in the grant writing process.
Writers have to decide what to say in the proposal in order to convince grant
sources to give your organization a grant. They often have to come up with
their own ideas to make an application shine.
"You do a lot in terms of actually designing the programs that you're writing
about," says Colleen Miron. "You're not just writing someone else's ideas,
you're actually writing your own. So you have to decide what's appropriate,
what's going to be the best way of doing things according to how a program
is going to be evaluated."
Katherine Kubarski says time management decisions are key to handling work
in a deadline-driven field.
"One of the most important concerns also is the deadline -- do we have
enough time to respond in full to the requirements, is there enough time to
develop a high-quality proposal," says Kubarski. "We like to take at least
30 days to turn around a foundation proposal and at least 45 days to turn
around a government proposal, which needs a more in-depth presentation of
statistics and forms filled out and such."
You're a grant writer who has just left a salaried position with a nonprofit
organization to start your own Internet-based grant writing service from home.
You've made enough contacts in your career to have a basic client base, but
things have been slow this month.
You're thinking of going back to the office part time. But you'd rather
be able to stay at home with your two small children. Just when you think
you'll have to go back to your old job, you get a call from a large nonprofit
group to write a major proposal to the government for a cancer research grant.
Their grant writer suddenly quit and they need someone to pick up the slack
immediately. They're willing to pay $5,000 for the work. There's just one
catch: the grant proposal must be written in 30 days.
You know the group meets all of the major criteria for grant success. They're
a bona fide nonprofit organization. Their ideas make them highly competitive
for the grant and the program they're seeking funds for is well defined and
feasible.
The rest is up to you, but that's the problem. You know how complex a government
grant application is. It requires all sorts of letters of support, bureaucratic
forms and extra statistical research. The earliest you can write a decent
proposal is 45 days.
What do you do?