Perhaps it can be said that a day in the life of a grant partner is unlike the day before and will surely be different than the following day. No two days are alike!
My days generally include the following tasks; finding grants, assembling customer proposals, grant and crowdfunding uploads, prospecting for new customers, evaluating grant research tools, marketing, accounting. There’s probably more to this list like recruiting, and general overhead tasks like evaluating insurance and other grant operation costs, but this should suffice for now.
Of course not all of these items occur on a single day; I try to prioritize office tasks and accounting for Monday and Tues for marketing and customer contacts, I try to make Wed a no-meeting day where I research, write, and submit grants, Thursday is a hybrid day of keyboard work and customer meetings. Fridays is generally reserved for accounting and office work day.
Finding Grants
Finding grants is like fishing in the ocean with a hook. Learning where certain types of grants reside is important, as is knowing how to use search filters, which can have more than 120 settings. After reducing a pool of over 30,000 grants to about 1,000 per customer, you then speed-read each and every grant listing to further winnow down the list to about 50, and then 10, and then the final five I present to my customers.
Assembling Customer Proposals
I use templates which speeds up the proposal process, however, each grant candidate typically has at least five or six unique elements. I typically don’t send the grant list prior to the customer presentation because the scoring of the grant is typically done better live. The context of proposing a grant candidate is easier to talk about with each customer than to write.
Grant and Crowdfunding Uploads
I used to believe that uploading grant and crowdfunding applications was the hardest part of this business, but with the exception of federal grants, it’s not difficult once you learn the skill. Non-federal grants usually take 30 – 60 minutes each, federal grants can take 8 hours each, and crowdfunding applications can take an hour each- if the customer has their dusks in a row.
Prospecting For New Customers
Balancing new customers with existing capacity is somewhat of an artful endeavor. The ebb and flow of work backlog is pretty interesting and as our operation grows, an increasing amount of new customers is by reference from existing customers. To me, this trend is very rewarding and validates what we’re doing- as well as providing learning opportunities. The process is ever being refined.
Evaluating Grant Research Tools
I am constantly on the hunt for better filtering tools and higher quality grant consolidation sites. Tools and grant lists broadly fall into one of two types- for-profit or non-profit. There are some fantastic non-profit grant filtering and grant consolidation sites; the same tools used for-profit customers are typically somewhat antiquated by comparison.
Marketing
It has been said that half of all marketing is wasted; the catch is to know which half is being wasted. Marketing is what we do to let others know how we can help them grow their business. Word of mouth is very powerful, and next to that getting the grants message to the right people, at the right time, and in the right way is essential. I prioritize attending business group meetings and business social events as those tend to have high concentrations of new business relationship prospects.
Accounting
I typically do A/R and A/P work on Fridays, as well as any other operational housekeeping like insurance, website work, and similar. You gotta keep the barn clean if you want the cows to produce milk.
A lot of what we get to do as a grant writer is pretty similar to other intellectual property and financial support work, of course there are specifics that appertain primarily to the wonderful work as a grant partner.
What’s your story?
Reach out to us per the contact info at grantsforyou.org.
Warm Regards-
Neil.