Contract Grantwriters

A small but not insignificant percentage of proposals are apt to be authored not by the applicant but by contract grantwriters. These are the pens-for-hire of the philanthropic world, who will for a fee write a proposal to describe the applicant's ideas. Program officers tend to harbor ambivalent feelings about contract grantwriters. On the one hand, grantmakers like them because they are pros; a proposal authored by a contract grantwriter is generally a pretty good one: clear, well written, and fluent in foundationese. Contract grantwriters can be particularly good at translating the good ideas of community-based organizations into good proposals. By preventing the good idea–bad proposal problem, they can make life much easier for both grantmaker and grantseeker.

On the other hand, program officers do tend to look askance at contract grantwriters when they use their writing skills to wrap a good proposal around a fundamentally bad idea. As an old Spanish proverb goes, “You may dress a monkey in silk, but it remains a monkey,” and grantmakers tend to resent anyone who creates more bad idea–good proposal situations for them to sort out.

Regardless of the quality of the idea about which they write, contract grantwriters act as intermediaries between grantmakers and grantseekers. Some do it deftly, others do it clumsily, but inevitably they create a certain distance between grantmaker and grantseeker. All things considered, most grantmakers would rather read the real words of the applicant, however inelegant they might be, than read the more polished but less authentic words of the contract grantwriter.