What I Do For a Living: A Glimpse Into Nonprofit Fundraising
In which I beg people for money via formal written request.
I’ve been writing on Medium for about two years now, but I have been writing for quite a long time before that. In past articles, I’ve briefly mentioned my major and job, but I wanted to go a little further into it and how I got here.
I am a grant writer by trade, and I’ve been doing it professionally for over a decade. Grant writing, for those of you who are unaware, is a profession whereby I solicit private and corporate foundations for money to fund the nonprofit agency that I work for. I write and edit the proposals to request grant funding, and I manage the subsequent contracts and reporting.
Grant writing is a very particular type of writing, in which you have to be descriptive and persuasive but often have limited space to make your case. One of the jokes I like to make is that I am intimately familiar with what 2,000 characters looks like, as it is a common restriction.
A grant proposal can take many forms. I have written proposals that are one page long, and I have that single page to make my pitch. Alternatively, I have written proposals to federal agencies that were 75 pages long. When I started that one, I wondered how I would possibly fill all of that…
