 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
Sign up to receive PND e-newsletters. |
|
| |
|
| Re: Providing lists of grants awarded to potential clients or employers
Posted by Tony Poderis   on 9/2/2010, 12:56 pm, in reply to "Providing lists of grants awarded to potential clients or employers"
VIP Poster | Message modified by user Tony Poderis 9/3/2010, 8:18 am
Andie: I would not do it.
If such requests from non-profits are indeed increasingly contained in their ads seeking to hire grant writing professionals, I suggest you ignore following those requests. With some of the more credible organizations searching for grant writing talent in that way, perhaps you can make initial contact to have the prospective clients know what really matters when engaging a grant proposal writing professional. See what "The grant writer will" (do) in the section titled, "How Do You Evaluate The Performance Of Grant Writers" in my article:
--- Positioning Grant Writers For Success
http://www.raise-funds.com/040202forum.html
If they still insist that you give that listing of grants and amounts, I suggest you think about walking away. They are looking to hire a fund-raiser, not a grant proposal writer who assists in the search for funding.
When interviewing and hiring dozens of grant writing professionals for my development staff, and later for my non-profit clients, all I wanted and needed from those professionals were samples of their writing and testimonials/recommendations from former employers or clients. A listing of grants awarded during the previous employment/engagement of a candidate for a new grant proposal writing job, would have meant little, if anything, to me. What about the grant proposals those same professionals were as well involved with which resulted in refusals, or the receiving of much lesser amounts than sought? Of course such a listing would be ridiculous. Thus, "success" for such grant writing cannot be measured by what is an arbitrary and rather meaningless listing.
In my opinion, the issue is something else other than concern that the requesting non-profit, as a potential client, will somehow "harvest" the listing and use the information as part of any prospect research they may be doing. Any non-profit which does that is probably not in the least sophisticated and professional enough to know that any such arbitrary listing cannot have many, if any, of those particular grantors' guidelines in sync with what their particular organization does. The listings are generally useless, at best, to most any other non-profit. So, why do they ask for such a listing?
I think the real reason for asking you to provide a listing of the grantors and granted amounts with which you were associated, will be used to set up an expectation of your future performance---even having them set a quota of sorts---regarding what you must bring to them from what you may show as "accomplishments" and "successes" earned elsewhere in very different settings.
These organizations could be among the many which see the success or failure of grant-getting as residing in the hands of the grant writer. When they do, they are failing to take into account something even more important than the grant application---the purpose of the funding. Poorly delineated projects, questionable budgets, poor presentations made by staff to grantors of the proposals, grantors with no funds available at the time, a small and limited number of actual viable prospects available, and a host of other weaknesses and adverse conditions, cannot be overcome by well-crafted grant proposals of the highest order.
To repeat, the awarding of grants has more to do with function than form, and grant writers are not the ones who make the policy and practice recommendations that lead to a search for funding, nor do they have any say in the grant decision process in the grantors' organizational hierarchy. So, why list them as if the grant writer "got" them?
Grant writers who deliberately, or inadvertently, communicate to prospective clients (or staff employers) that somehow they "got" the grants, are setting themselves up for trouble.
Tony
Tony Poderis
http://www.raise-funds.com
- Fund Raising Forum Library
- Exhibit & Document Library
• Permission to reproduce any material is not required
|
| |
