What I Do For a Living: A Glimpse Into Nonprofit Fundraising

In which I beg people for money via formal written request.

I’ve been writing on Medium for about two years now, but I have been writing for quite a long time before that. In past articles, I’ve briefly mentioned my major and job, but I wanted to go a little further into it and how I got here.

I am a grant writer by trade, and I’ve been doing it professionally for over a decade. Grant writing, for those of you who are unaware, is a profession whereby I solicit private and corporate foundations for money to fund the nonprofit agency that I work for. I write and edit the proposals to request grant funding, and I manage the subsequent contracts and reporting.

Grant writing is a very particular type of writing, in which you have to be descriptive and persuasive but often have limited space to make your case. One of the jokes I like to make is that I am intimately familiar with what 2,000 characters looks like, as it is a common restriction.

A grant proposal can take many forms. I have written proposals that are one page long, and I have that single page to make my pitch. Alternatively, I have written proposals to federal agencies that were 75 pages long. When I started that one, I wondered how I would possibly fill all of that space. After I wrote the draft, I wondered how I was going to cut out ten pages to get it back down to the 75-page limit.

Very often, there is a lot of money on the line in my proposals. In 2020, just before COVID struck, I had six weeks to write a proposal that would fund 20% of my agency’s budget for the next three years. Several million dollars were on the line. Sometimes my proposals make or break a program, and getting rejected could mean that people lose their jobs.

On top of that, it is a very deadline-driven job. I live and die by my calendar, and missing a deadline is missing out on money. It can get very stressful sometimes. I often have to schedule my time off around my deadlines, since being gone the week something is due is…not ideal.

Another quirk of the job is that I can’t do it alone, and I am eternally grateful for the support of the various program directors, finance people, and data and outcome specialists who provide me with the information I need to do my job. It is a job that requires teamwork, and it’s incredibly hard to do it by myself. When millions of dollars are on the line, you need as many editors as you can get.

That said, I enjoy the job and am fairly good at it. I like the idea that my work helps support my agency and the people we serve. I am a fairly service-minded person, and I like the idea that I can do a job that supports people through a nonprofit format as opposed to grinding away in a corporate machine. My work is important to me and many people in my agency, from the program directors who rely on my job to keep their program funded to the clients that we serve with those programs. It’s very fulfilling work, and I love it.

So, how the heck did I get into grant writing? Well, it started when I was a wee child in grade school…

Okay, I’ll skip that part, except to say that I was always interested in writing, even as a small child. In school, I enjoyed writing reports and papers, as it was fun and came easily to me. My favorite story is when I was in high school and procrastinated on a first draft, hammered out a couple of paragraphs the night before it was due, and had the audacity to title it “It Was Late and I Was Tired.” My teacher was less than pleased.

In community college, I was planning to major in chemistry but kept taking philosophy and writing courses because they were fun. Turns out that majoring in chemistry is hard when you’ve only had one chemistry class. When I transferred to University, my faculty advisor lamented my poor planning and told me that I would be way behind the other students my age.

Meanwhile, the advisor that worked in the enrollment office suggested that I take up a technical writing certificate, as it would help me with my potential science career. It seemed like a good idea to me. Flash forward a few semesters, and I’m doing poorly at my chemistry and math classes but excelling at my writing classes. After some contemplation (and several months off my meds), I decided to take up writing full time.

My parents were supportive but less than thrilled. My father wondered if he’d need to remodel the basement so his writer son would have somewhere to live. They were impressed by my planning, though — I had researched technical writing careers, and there were many avenues available to me.

Technical writing is pretty much anything you read that requires some sort of technical understanding, and not necessarily in a technology-related sense. Instruction manuals are technical writing. Terms of Service are technical writing. A form that you fill out at the doctor’s office is technical writing. All of that has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually a technical writer.

Having shifted to writing, my grades turned around and I was getting As and Bs in my classes again. Eventually, I neared the end of my University career and was required to do an internship as part of my degree. After a few months of searching, I found an internship as a grant writer. Having no idea what that was, I asked one of my professor mentors, who said I’d probably love it. She was quite right.

I spent a semester writing grants for a local branch of a national nonprofit. I got a crash course in grant research, how to write proposals, and what to expect as a grant writer. The people there were nice and easy to work with, and I excelled. I had found my calling, and the rest was history.

After graduation, I did a stint as a volunteer grant writing to get the mythical one-to-three years of experience that “entry-level” jobs required (it was 2009, and finding a job anywhere was tough). Eventually, a small, semi-rural nonprofit took a chance on me as a part-time writer, and I’ve been working professionally ever since.

I came to grant writing from a writer’s approach, but not everyone goes in that direction. There is a bit of a joke among nonprofit employees: “other duties as assigned.” I am a grant writer, but I have also directed traffic, carried boxes, cleaned out storage rooms, overseen PowerPoint presentations at galas, and have generally done whatever was required of me at the time. Everyone at a nonprofit wears many hats, up to and including the CEO in many cases.

The upshot of that is that many grant writers started as clinicians or executive assistants or accountants or some other completely random type of employee. One day, somebody was needed to write a grant and they were selected somehow, whether volunteering themselves or being voluntold. And, lo and behold, they were good at it. I’ve met grant writers who came from all sorts of backgrounds, and many of them don’t have degrees anywhere close to related to writing.

The thing about grant writing is that it takes a very particular style to be good at it, and not everyone has that style. I’ve managed a couple of interns who did some grant writing, and there isn’t really a way to predict how well someone will do. One intern was a college student with a writing degree who wasn’t very good at it. Another was a single mom who wanted to volunteer a couple of days a week who turned out to be a natural at it.

The upshot is that good grant writers are hard to come by. There’s not a lot of us in any given community, although as nonprofits become bigger and more regimented, and as fundraising becomes more standardized, grant writers are becoming much more necessary to the fundraising model. As such, it’s a growing field.

It’s also a decently-paying field. Having a relatively small pool of good grant writers means we can command better wages than many nonprofit jobs. I can support my spouse, my four cats, a mortgage, and a car on just my salary. Granted, I live in a low-cost Midwestern city, so that helps.

One additional perk is that I can mess with people when I tell them what I do. The two common responses I get when I tell people about my job are “I didn’t know you could do that as a job” and “can you write me a grant?” To the latter question, I generally tell them that my rate is $75 an hour for freelance grant writing, which generally causes them to balk a bit. Honestly, I’m probably undercharging.

Grant writing is a fantastic field, but it’s not for everyone. I have found great satisfaction and success as a grant writer, but not every writer will be good at it; alternatively, many people with minimal writing experience may be fantastic at it. I encourage anyone who is interested to seek out their local Grant Professional Association (GPA). You can find their nationwide website here.

Therein is the life of a grant writer through my eyes. Nonprofit work isn’t for everyone, but if you’re a charity-minded person, you may be a good fit. If you don’t think it will work for you, I encourage you to donate time or money to the local nonprofit of your choice. If you can’t think of any that sound good, start at your local United Way.

I promise, whatever you can give, it will be helpful. Every donor and volunteer at my agency is an important part of our agency’s survival; your donation will always be appreciated.