Why I'll decline a proposal before I'll write a bad one.

I said yes to almost everything in my first years of practice.  A nonprofit would call. We would talk.  I would hear the gaps in the program, I would hear the hesitation in the executive director's voice when she described her outcomes, I would hear the board chair describe a theory of change that had not yet been built and I would still say yes, because I wanted the work and because I believed that a well written proposal could compensate for what was not yet in place.

It cannot. I learned this the expensive way.

There are things a grant writer cannot write her way around.  A program that has not been designed. An outcome the organization cannot actually measure.  A budget that does not add up because nobody has been willing to make the tradeoffs the budget is asking for.  A staff that is not in place to execute what the proposal will promise.  A board that has not agreed on what the organization is actually trying to do.

I know every grant writer has written proposals into those conditions. I have too.  I have seen them decline. I have seen them win, which is worse, because then the organization has twelve months to produce what the proposal said it would produce, and the grant writer is not the one who has to stand in front of the program officer twelve months later and explain what went wrong.

So I changed how I work. I began declining engagements.

I decline when the program has not been built. I tell the executive director: before I write your proposal, your program needs to be real. Outcomes defined. Staff plan documented.  Theory of change written down.  I will help her build those things if she wants; that is different, separate work but I will not paper over their absence with a narrative that sounds like they exist.

I decline when the numbers do not match the mission.  If an organization wants to raise a million dollars for a program its current infrastructure can absorb two hundred thousand of, I will say so. I will not write a million dollar proposal for a program that can only execute on a fifth of it.  The funder will notice within a year.  The organization will lose the funder. The grant writer will be blamed, and rightly so.

I decline when the organization wants me to write a proposal for a program it has not decided is its priority. I can tell the difference, after enough engagements, between a program an organization is genuinely committed to and a program it is pursuing because the funding exists. The second kind of proposal almost always wins and almost always creates a problem.  I will not write them anymore.

I decline when the engagement is structured in a way that compromises the work.  I do not take success fee only engagements.  I do not take engagements where the writer is expected to invent outcomes the program has not yet produced.  I do not take engagements where the executive director does not have the time to review and approve the proposal before submission.

I turn down more work than I accept now, and the practice is stronger for it. My clients win.  They win because the proposals I write are built on programs that can actually deliver.  They win because I will not take a grant that will embarrass them in year two.  They win because the funder reads my work knowing it has been pressure tested by a writer who is protecting her own reputation as carefully as she is protecting the nonprofit's.

There is a harder version of this truth that I try to say aloud to every new client.

A grant writer's willingness to decline a proposal is the clearest signal of her quality. Anyone who says yes to everything is telling you, without intending to, that her reputation does not depend on her clients' outcomes.  The grant writer worth hiring is the one who will turn you down when turning you down is the right answer and who will help you fix what is underneath the proposal before she agrees to write it.

When a nonprofit asks me why I am more expensive than the writer they talked to last month, this is the answer.  The price reflects the discipline.  The discipline is what gets their proposals funded.  The funding is what builds the multi year relationship. The multi year relationship is what funds the mission.

There are a small number of grant writers who work this way. Find one, and keep them.