The majority of my grant writing I do alone. Certainly not my choice. I gather information and data from the nonprofit, ask for help, get a “no,” and write the grant myself. However, I recently joined a nonprofit team to write a grant.

It was great. A leader was assigned (not me), people were energetic about providing information (almost unheard of), and my workload as a volunteer was significantly reduced (yeah!).

I didn’t mind putting the grant package together or doing some of the narrative writing because the team members helped. This is what volunteer grant writing should be about—the paid staff helping the person not getting paid.

Of course, not all teamwork is great. Teams can be as dysfunctional as some families. I think the key is motivation. Everyone should feel they are contributing to the final product.

While working on a grant, most of the time I look to the nonprofit staff to help. I don’t ask them to be team members because they may run away. I ask them for information and data. I try to get them to read over what I wrote. I make them secret team members. It’s a secret to them that they are on a team.

I think teams have a greater chance of success to get a grant than one person doing everything. More mistakes are made by one person. Also, only one viewpoint gets presented. Yet, nonprofits usually have one person doing all the grant writing. This can be the executive director, paid staff like the volunteer coordinator, or a volunteer.

Everyone has talent and fault. One person is good or bad in one area and another the opposite. I prefer the team concept because I am certainly do not always have the right solution.

Most foundations have a priority of what is most important to them in a grant application. The easy way to find out their priorities is to call the foundation and ask the staff members. Yet, this doesn’t always work. Either there is no way to contact them or they don’t explain their priorities clearly. There are other ways to find clues to the priorities.

For online applications, most of the fields limit the number of characters. The more characters allowed, the more details the foundation wants to see. A grant writer should spend more time on places where a greater amount of information is required. Yes, there’s more to write about, but what is written should be data, information, and details of the project.

Another clue can be found in the application guidelines. Many foundations repeat words that they believe are important. Those words should be the theme of the grant request (mention them several times).

Whether I talk to someone at the foundation or not, I still research the foundation looking for blogs, articles, or comments by recipients of previous awards. There can be a wealth of knowledge written about the foundations and board members (decision makers). I do not pay much attention to previous awards.

For many foundations, like most organizations, things change from year to year. Sometimes the foundation makes different types of awards each year. In any case, the past does not generally foretell the future in grant awards.

The most important thing about writing a grant is for the writer to get to know the foundation as much as possible. It is a lot easier when the writer does.