If you're the only person who writes grants at your organization, grants are rarely your only job. You're also helping with the gala, thanking donors, pulling numbers for the board and answering the program director's questions about a report. Then a notice opens and the application lands on top of everything else.
There's nobody to hand a section to and nobody to read your draft with fresh eyes. This article covers what that situation takes: systems that act like the colleagues you don't have, sources of outside support and a few habits that protect the hours you need to write.
Admit what the job really is
A one-person grants shop is several jobs at once: researcher, project manager, writer, editor, compliance checker and records clerk. In a larger team those roles are split. Alone, you do all of them, and the switching between them costs time.
That's worth saying out loud, to yourself first and then to your supervisor. Many tools that work for teams assume someone else will catch the error or remember the date. You need versions of those tools that work without a second person.
The goal isn't to work harder. It's to arrange the work so you make fewer decisions from scratch, and so the things you'd forget are written down somewhere you'll see them.
Build systems that stand in for colleagues
Three systems cover most of what a missing teammate would do.
A calendar that remembers for you
Put every deadline in one place: application due dates, internal deadlines, report dates for active awards and the registrations that have to stay current. A grants calendar and pipeline is the single most useful thing a solo writer can build, because it replaces the colleague who says "isn't that report due next week?"
Add internal deadlines too. A partner letter due to you a week before the application is due is a date you set yourself, and it belongs on the same calendar.
A library of reusable material
Keep your organization's description, mission statement, staff bios, program summaries, board list, audited financial figures and standard attachments in one folder with clear names and a "last updated" date. When a notice asks for them, you copy, adapt and move on.
Reuse needs a limit. Material that fits one funder's priorities rarely fits another unchanged. Treat the library as raw material to adapt, not text to paste.
Checklists for the steps you can't skip
Write one checklist for starting an application and one for finishing it. The starting list might include reading the notice, noting the scoring criteria and deadline and deciding whether to apply at all. The finishing list might include checking every required attachment, confirming names and figures match across documents and doing the portal upload early.
Here is a hypothetical example. Say a one-person development office at a rural health clinic keeps a "finish line" checklist of eight items. In the week before a deadline, the writer works down it each morning. When a notice adds a new required form, she adds a line to the list, so the next application starts with that lesson already built in. The checklist does the job a second reader would otherwise do.
Find support outside your building
Working alone doesn't have to mean working in isolation. The people who understand your job are mostly outside your organization.
- Professional associations. Look for a grant professionals' group in your area. Meeting people who do the same work is a natural way to trade advice.
- Your state's nonprofit association. Many states have one. Check its events and training pages for sessions that fit your work.
- Funder and agency learning resources. Grants.gov has a Learn Grants section with introductory material on the grant lifecycle, grant policies, terms and careers. It's a good place to fill a gap in your knowledge without asking anyone.
- A peer reader. Find one person, at a similar organization if possible, who will read each other's drafts. Fresh eyes catch the jargon you've stopped seeing. Agree on a turnaround, such as two working days, so the favor doesn't slow either of you down.
- A mentor. Someone with more years in the field can tell you which battles are worth fighting with a funder and which are not.
Support also comes from inside. A program director who owns the outcomes section, or a finance lead who owns the budget table, is your team for that application. Gathering your project team covers how to ask for that help in a way people will say yes to.
Protect your focus
The scarce resource for a solo writer is uninterrupted time. A few habits help.
- Block writing time on the calendar. Two protected hours a week is a realistic starting point. Treat it like a meeting with a funder: you don't move it for a minor request.
- Batch the small things. Answer routine requests at set times of day, not as they arrive.
- Say "not yet" instead of "no". When someone asks for an urgent favor, offer a day and time. People accept a date more readily than a refusal.
- Decide what you won't do. Not every opportunity is worth a week of your time. A quick go/no-go check keeps the pipeline realistic. Five questions before you commit a week gives you a set to use.
- Plan the last 72 hours. Deadline crunch is the hardest stretch for a one-person shop. The 72-hour checklist helps you spread the work so the final days are for checking, not writing.
Tell your supervisor about the writing blocks and why you have them. Protected time is easier to keep when someone else expects it.
Your next step
This week, open your calendar and block two hours for writing, at the time of day when you think best. Put the same block on next week's calendar and the week after. Then spend ten minutes listing which of the three systems above is weakest: the calendar, the library or the checklists. Fix that one first.
SoliContraX is built for people doing the work of a team. Upload the notice, approve a concept and start from a draft written from your organization's own materials, so more of your time goes to review. See how to get started.