The Essential Qualities of a Grant Writing Consultant
In order to become a successful grant writing consultant, you must have certain skills. These skills are absolutely necessary for success. Some can be learned, others are inherently natural. If you do not have all of these-don’t worry, you can probably figure out how to do it, either by taking a course, seeing a counselor, or getting real life experience (my favorite way!)
-Confidence. You need to have confidence, without seeming arrogant. Sometimes you will have to cold call or meet in person with grant writing foundations that have never heard of you or your organization before. You need to be confident in both your skills and in the organization you are working for.
-Great communcation skills, both written and spoken. Again, being a grant writing consultant isn’t all about writing (hmmm…maybe they should change the name?), you will often have to speak with people and explain yourself as well. This is especially true when you are first becoming a grant writer because you need to convince people to trust you with little experience.
-Research skills. As a grant writing consultant, you will constantly be researching things. You will need to know how to find grants and organization information/statistics online and in a library. The grant proposal writing only comes after good research.
-People skills. Whether you are working freelance or through a grant writing firm, you will need to have good people skills. This is what will get you the job and possibly even the grant!
-Patience. It’s very hard, after spending so much time, taking a grant writing consultant course, researching a grant and grant proposal writing, that you still may have to wait up to one year to hear back from the grant writing foundations to find out whether your organization won the grant or not. This is just how grant writing fundraising is. You will be totally rushed for months to get the proposal written, but then you will have to wait for more months to see if you got it. This is also a good reason to always keep busy, which leads me into my next point…
-Time management. No matter where you are working as a grant writing consultant you will need to work on multiple projects at once, perhaps even with multiple organizations.
-Passion. You must truly believe in the organization’s mission. Your passion will obviously show through in the final proposal. This will help immensely in getting the grant successfully.
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