Grants, written the way your mission deserves to be read.
A private grants practice for nonprofits ready to be taken seriously by institutional funders. Selective. By referral and direct inquiry.
Most proposals are not declined for lack of merit.
They are declined because the mission was rendered in the wrong language. I write to how funders actually read, not how my clients wish they would read. That difference is the entire practice.
Strategy Before Writing
Funder research and prospect mapping first. I will not write into a landscape neither of us has read.
Advanced Grant Writing
Letters of inquiry, full proposals, budget narratives, logic models. Federal, state, foundation, corporate.
Beyond the Award
Post award compliance, reporting, and the funder relationship that decides whether you are renewed.
Five things I hear in the first thirty minutes.
- iWe keep applying to the same three funders every year.
- iiWe were declined and never told why.
- iiiOur program is strong. The proposal does not sound like it.
- ivWe won the grant and now we cannot keep up with the reporting.
- vWe hired a writer once. We did not get the work we paid for.
The proposal is the deliverable. The strategy behind it is the work.
The Work Itself
Most of it happens before a word is written.
Funder research, program interviews, the budget conversation nobody wants to have, and the reading of guidelines that most applicants skim. By the time the narrative is drafted, the decisions that determine whether it is funded have already been made.
Not every organization is ready for an engagement.
Some need the funder research before they need the writer. Some need to know whether they are ready at all. Three products, priced so the answer is not gated behind a retainer.
Twelve ranked prospects, matched to your programs, delivered in seven business days.
The audit a funder runs on you before it reads a word of your narrative.
For grant consultants. Agreement, scope language, and rate structure that holds.
Declined twice. Funded on the third.
A California youth development nonprofit had been declined twice on the same multiyear federal education grant.
I restructured the needs narrative, realigned the logic model to reviewer criteria, and rebuilt the budget sustainability section.
Funded on the third submission.
Kristy is the most thorough grant writer I have ever worked with. She reads everything, asks the questions no one else asks.
Recent writing
Tipping.
The largest grant your organization has ever been offered can also be the one that costs you your public charity status. Almost nobody in this field will mention it.
ReadThe rate changed. Your budget did not.
The de minimis indirect cost rate went from ten percent to fifteen on October 1, 2024. Almost two years later I am still opening budget templates that say ten.
ReadThe first conversation.
Every engagement begins with a thirty minute discovery call. No fee, no pitch. A chance to discuss your funding history and whether working together is the right fit for both of us.