Why I decline a proposal before I write a bad one.
I said yes to almost everything in my first years. What I learned is that a proposal cannot fix a program, and pretending otherwise costs the client more than the fee.
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, and I would take the engagement anyway, because I wanted the work and because I believed I could write around it.
You cannot write around it. That is the whole lesson, and it took me longer to learn than I would like to admit.
A proposal is a description. It can be a precise description, an elegant one, one that anticipates every question a reviewer will ask. What it cannot be is a description of something that does not exist. If the program has no staffing plan, the narrative will have a hole where the staffing plan goes, and a program officer who reads forty of these a cycle will find that hole in under a minute.
The uncomfortable part is that a skilled writer can hide the hole for a while. I can write a paragraph about capacity that sounds like a staffing plan. I can write outcome language that sounds measurable without committing to a measurement. That is the version of this craft I am least proud of knowing how to do, and it is the reason I decline.
Because here is what actually happens when I take that engagement. The organization pays me. I write something good. It is declined, because the reviewer found the hole. The executive director now believes the problem was the writing, so next year she hires a different writer, and the same hole produces the same result. Meanwhile the program still is not built, and two funding cycles are gone.
The decline is the more useful deliverable. It is also the harder conversation, because it is a conversation in which I tell someone who came to me for help that I am not going to take her money.
So it matters what I say instead of no.
What I try to do is name the specific thing, in one sentence, and then tell her what would change my answer. Your evaluation plan does not measure anything a funder can verify, and until it does, no proposal I write will survive review. Build that, and I will take the engagement. That is a different conversation from a decline. It is a scope of work she can act on without me.
There are four situations where I decline, and they are worth naming because most of them are not about quality.
The program is proposed rather than built. There is a plan, there is passion, there is no staffing, no site, no schedule and no participants. This is the most common one, and it is almost always a timing problem rather than a capability problem. The answer is a year, not a writer.
The deadline does not allow the work. Someone calls in the second week of a four week window for a federal application. I can produce something in that time. I cannot produce something at the standard the work requires, and submitting a weak federal application has a cost beyond the decline: reviewers remember organizations, and so do program officers.
I am being asked to state something I cannot verify. Outcomes that were not measured. Numbers that came from an estimate someone made in a meeting. Partnerships that exist as a conversation rather than an agreement. I will write a bracketed placeholder and ask for the source. If the source does not exist, the sentence does not go in, and if the sentence is load bearing, the proposal does not go out.
The mission is outside what I know. I work in education, youth development, social services, workforce and the arts. A grant writer who claims every sector is telling you they will be learning your field on your deadline, at your expense.
None of this is high mindedness. It is the only sustainable way to run a practice where the results are the marketing. I do not have a sales team. What I have is a set of organizations that got funded, and the fastest way to stop having that is to take work I cannot do well.
Most grant writers will never tell you this, but the best ones decline more engagements than they accept. Ask the next one you talk to what they turned down last quarter and why. The answer will tell you more than a portfolio.
How this practice decides. Other practitioners set their thresholds differently, and a writer who takes an engagement I would decline is not necessarily wrong.