Almost nobody asks me how to find a grant writer. They ask a more honest question underneath it: how do I make sure I do not waste money on one?
Reasonable. The field has no licensing requirement, the results are slow to arrive, and by the time you can tell whether a hire was good you have already spent a season on it. So here is how I would vet someone if I were on your side of the table.
Where the good ones actually come from
Ranked by how well each source works in practice, not by how easy it is.
- Another executive director who has actually paid someone. Not "I know a person who does grants." Someone who wrote checks, saw the applications, and knows what came back. This is far and away the best source, and it costs you two emails.
- A program officer at a funder you already work with. Funders see hundreds of applications and know exactly whose work is clean. Most will not hand you a formal referral, but many will tell you what strong applications in their portfolio have in common, and some will point you toward a name.
- Your state or regional association of nonprofits. Consultant directories at that level are usually vetted at least loosely and are local, which matters more than people expect for state and county funding.
- The Grant Professionals Association. Membership is not a competence guarantee, but it means the person has opted into a professional code of ethics, and that code is the basis of several of the red flags below.
- LinkedIn. Useful mostly for verifying someone you already found, and for seeing whether their described history is corroborated by the organizations they name.
- General freelance marketplaces. Last, not never. They select for the lowest bid, and the lowest bid on a complex application is rarely the cheapest outcome once you count the staff hours you spend fixing it.
The five questions
Ask these on the first call. The answers separate a professional from a good talker faster than any writing sample.
1. What is your success rate, and how do you count it?
The second half of the question is the whole point. "Seventy percent" means nothing without a denominator. Seventy percent of what, over what period, and did they choose the opportunities or did the client?
A real answer sounds like: over the last two years I submitted roughly this many applications, this many were funded, most of the losses were in one federal program that is heavily oversubscribed, and I decline to submit when the fit is weak so my denominator is smaller than it would otherwise be.
Be suspicious of a high number delivered without hesitation. Be more comfortable with a moderate number delivered with detail.
2. Tell me about a proposal you wrote that lost, and why
Everyone loses. Grant work is a portfolio activity, and even strong applications lose to oversubscription, a funder's shifting priorities, or an internal candidate you never knew about.
What you are testing is whether they debriefed. A grant professional who requested reviewer comments, read the score sheet, and can tell you which criterion they underweighted is someone who improves between cycles. Someone who says every loss was the funder's politics has learned nothing from any of them.
3. Who handles the reporting after the award?
This question catches more people than the other four combined.
Winning money is the beginning of the obligation, not the end of it. Somebody has to file the progress reports, track expenditures against the approved budget, document match, and produce whatever the funder asks for at closeout. If the grant writer disappears at submission and your team has never run a report, you have bought yourself a compliance problem with a nice check attached.
I have watched what happens when that gap goes unmanaged. We took on an organization where a departed employee had never reported hundreds of thousands of dollars of federally funded work that was genuinely performed. Reconstructing the record and filing an appeal took months of work that a functioning reporting process would have made unnecessary.
Ask who reports, in writing, before you ask what it costs.
4. How many hours of my staff's time will this take, and from whom?
A grant writer who says "almost none, I will handle it" is telling you they intend to write the application without your program data. That application will read exactly like that, and reviewers can tell.
Good applications need your outcomes, your budget, your staffing plan, and usually an hour or two of your program director's time. The honest answer names those and puts deadlines on them.
5. Have you written for this funder, or this kind of funding, before?
Funding types are genuinely different crafts. A federal application with a compliance plan, a match requirement, and a multi-year budget is not the same work as a two-page family foundation letter of inquiry. Government contracts are different again. Someone excellent at one can be genuinely weak at another, and most people will tell you honestly if you ask directly.
The four red flags
A fee set as a percentage of the award. This is the clearest one, and it is worth understanding why rather than just avoiding it. Percentage-based and contingent compensation for fundraising is prohibited under the ethical codes of the profession, including those of the Grant Professionals Association and the Association of Fundraising Professionals. Beyond the ethics, federal cost principles generally treat organized fundraising costs as unallowable, so paying a commission out of the award itself is usually not permitted anyway. And the incentive is backwards: a commission rewards volume of submissions, not fit, and volume of submissions is exactly what wastes your staff's time. If someone proposes this, they either do not know the standards of their own field or they do not care about them.
Any guarantee of funding. Nobody controls the decision. Nobody sees the other applications. Nobody knows the funder's board dynamics that year. A guarantee is either a misunderstanding of the work or a sales tactic, and neither one is what you want handling your federal application.
A quote before they have read anything. A price produced before they have opened the funding notice, looked at your most recent 990, or asked what shape your program data is in is a price built from a template. The scope of a grant application varies enormously with the funder's requirements and with how organized your own material is. Someone quoting blind has not assessed either.
No questions about your outcomes. If the first call is all mission and no numbers, notice it. Applications are won on specific results attached to specific populations. A grant professional's instinct is to find out early whether those numbers exist, because if they do not, that is the first problem to solve and it is not a writing problem.
What belongs in the agreement
Keep it short, but make sure it covers these.
- Scope by named opportunity. "Grant writing services" is not a scope. "The application for this program, this deadline" is.
- Your deadlines, not just theirs. The agreement should say what you owe them and by when. Most late applications are late because the client's budget numbers arrived four days before submission.
- Who presses submit. Portal access, authorized signatures, and the actual act of submission should be assigned to a named person. This sounds trivial until an application misses a hard cutoff by minutes.
- Ownership of the work. The narrative, the budget, and the attachments are yours, in editable formats, whether or not the application is funded. That library is worth more over time than any single award.
- Post-award scope. State plainly whether reporting is included, available separately, or not offered.
- A fee structure that is hourly, flat per proposal, or a monthly retainer. All three are legitimate and each fits a different situation, which I break down in what it costs to hire a grant writer. None of them is a percentage of the award.
When you are not ready to hire one yet
I turn down grant work for the same reasons I turn down operations work, and you should know them before you spend money.
If your program outcomes are not tracked anywhere, a grant writer cannot manufacture them. Fix the data first, even roughly, because the strongest sentence in any application is a real number.
If your financials are not current, most funders will ask for a recent audit or 990 and a board-approved budget, and no amount of narrative substitutes for those attachments.
And if you cannot administer an award once it lands, winning one makes your situation worse rather than better. That is an operations problem before it is a funding problem, and it is usually cheaper to fix in that order.
The short version
Get a referral from someone who has actually paid for the work. Ask how they count their success rate, what they lost and why, and who handles the reporting. Walk away from percentages and guarantees. Put the scope, your own deadlines, and ownership of the work in writing.
And hire for one opportunity first. A single application tells you more about how somebody works than any interview will.
Common questions
Where do I find a grant writer?
In order of how well it works: a referral from another executive director who has actually paid someone and seen the outcome, a suggestion from a program officer at a funder you already work with, your state or regional association of nonprofits, the Grant Professionals Association directory, and LinkedIn. General freelance marketplaces are last. They are not useless, but they optimize for the lowest bid, and the lowest bid on a federal application is almost never the cheapest option once you count your own staff time.
What makes a great grant writer?
Three things, and none of them are prose style. They tell you not to apply for things, which means they are protecting your staff time instead of billing hours. They ask about your program data and your budget before they ask about your mission, because that is where applications actually break. And they can explain what happens after the award, because a grant you cannot report on is a liability rather than revenue.
How much experience should a grant writer have?
Match the experience to your pipeline rather than counting years. Someone with five years of foundation work is the wrong hire for a federal application with a compliance plan and a match requirement, and someone with a federal background is overqualified and overpriced for a $10,000 family foundation ask. Ask what percentage of their work in the last two years looked like the work you are hiring for. That answer tells you more than a resume.
What questions should I ask a grant writer before hiring?
What is your success rate and how do you count it. Tell me about a proposal you wrote that lost and why. Who handles reporting after the award. How many hours of my staff's time will this take and from whom. Have you written for this funder or this funding type before. The last two matter most, because a grant writer who never asks for your time is planning to write the application without your program data, and that application will read like it.
What are the red flags when hiring a grant writer?
A fee set as a percentage of the award, any guarantee of funding, a quote produced before they have read the funding notice or looked at your financials, and no questions about your program outcomes. Softer warning signs include a portfolio of nothing but wins, an unwillingness to name the funders they have worked with even in general terms, and treating the post-award reporting as somebody else's job.
Can I hire a grant writer on a freelance or per-project basis?
Yes, and for most small organizations it is the right structure to start with. Hire for one named opportunity, with a defined scope and a defined deadline for your own inputs. You find out how someone actually works, they find out whether your data is in usable shape, and both of you learn that at the cost of one application rather than a year's retainer. If it goes well, a retainer is the natural next step once you have a pipeline worth maintaining rather than a single deadline.