Supporting Your Nonprofit’s Grant Writing Volunteers: 9 Tips

Volunteers push your nonprofit’s mission forward, and they might even support one of your most impactful ongoing activities—grant writing.

Grant writing plays an essential role for nonprofits of all sizes. Grants provide funding for your programs, events, and operations, and a robust grant writing practice builds your organization’s connections with funders to unlock future opportunities. But grant writing can also be tricky.

Grant writing volunteers, whether experienced or new, need your support. There are a lot of moving parts to effective grant writing, and no one likes to be thrown into an important project without the context or materials they need! 

Proactively supporting these volunteers’ work will not only improve their experience (boosting retention) but also increase the overall quality and effectiveness of your proposals.

Let’s explore a few key tips for supporting grant writing volunteers, broken down into the primary stages of the grant seeking process.

The Planning Stage: Set Your Grant Volunteers Up to Succeed

The planning or pre-writing stage of grant writing consists of these key tasks:

1. Defining your nonprofit’s needs, projects that need funding, and their timeframes.
2. Identifying well-aligned grant opportunities.
3. Researching and prioritizing the grant opportunities to choose the first target.
4. Familiarizing yourself with the grant’s guidelines and requirements.
5. Leading a kickoff meeting to introduce the grant and request info from your team.

Depending on the scope of your volunteers’ involvement, they may or may not be directly involved in these steps. 

Some nonprofits identify their grant targets first and recruit volunteers to help write the proposals, while smaller shops may rely entirely on volunteers for the full process. If your organization falls into the latter category, consider these tips for improving your volunteers’ experiences during these crucial first steps:

• Equip them with research tools, guidance, and context. Finding grant opportunities can be challenging—there are tons of grant databases and posting boards to sift through. If your nonprofit already has access to preferred sources, make sure to teach your volunteers how to use them. Provide plenty of context about the project or program that needs funding, and lay out a few guidelines to help them quickly determine relevance when researching grant opportunities.
• Work with them to prioritize opportunities. Determining a grant’s alignment and competitiveness is an essential skill for grant seeking. When you choose the right opportunities to pursue, you’ll save time and ultimately secure more support. Teach volunteers how to research a funder’s past grants, gauge the competitiveness of opportunities, and build a shortlist of the most well-aligned options. Then, review the list and provide direction on where attention should go first.
• Assign a staff liaison to help lead project kickoff. Grants often require input from multiple departments—programming, leadership, accounting, and more. This is why the kickoff meeting is so important for getting everyone on the same page. Volunteers likely won’t have the access and pull they need to wrangle all the right team members, so help them by assigning a liaison to serve as their buddy for the project. This will be especially important if your volunteers are helping virtually and can’t easily contact other team members.

The Writing Stage: Put it All Together

Whether you ask volunteers to help identify grant opportunities or not, the actual writing stage is where they’ll have the greatest impact. This is when the proposal itself comes together, and it takes careful thought, collaboration, and the right data to craft a winning one.

The writing stage includes these tasks:

1. Developing a narrative skeleton or outline for the proposal.
2. Gathering the right data, anecdotes, and other details for the draft.
3. Completing a first draft of the proposal.
4. Regularly checking in on progress and following up cross-team as needed.
5. Compiling any supplemental documents needed by the funder.
6. Reviewing and revising the complete proposal before submitting.

Support your volunteers through this process by following these tips:

• Create and stick to a clear timeline, then check in. The staff liaison should stay on top of the grant project’s timeline and regularly check in to see how it’s going. Empower your volunteers to take ownership of the timeline, too, by having them send regular progress updates to the team members who attended the kickoff meeting.
• Help volunteers gather the materials and data they need. Follow up with other teams as necessary to provide volunteers the information they need for the proposal, and gather these resources early. Some documents, like budgets and official Resolutions from the board, are essential but can take a while to secure. A staff member may be in the best position to push for these resources, so know when to step in. Volunteers may also be less familiar with nonprofit budgets and other internal documents. Help them interpret this information so they can effectively communicate it in the proposal.
• Provide standardized templates or outlines for the proposal. Blank page anxiety comes for us all, especially when grant writing for the first time. Prepare a template for your volunteers that includes the required sections of the grant. Learn Grant Writing recommends starting the draft by filling in this “narrative skeleton” with key points and then working backward to flesh out the draft with the details and data you’ve gathered. This approach might be ideal for guiding first-time writers through the process. If you’ve secured grants in the past, copies of those proposals could be helpful models. Just remind volunteers that proposals need to be tailored to each unique funding opportunity.

The Post-Award Stage: Empower Grant Writing Volunteers to Drive More Impact

After you’ve secured a grant (congrats!), there’s more work to be done. Grants need to be carefully managed so that your nonprofit can report back to the funder on your progress. Some types of grants, like federal and matching grants, have particularly stringent reporting requirements that you’ll need to follow.

Tasks to handle in this stage generally include:

1. Executing the funded project according to the steps/timeline you detailed in the proposal.
2. Keeping track of project-related expenses in an organized way.
3. Drafting reports according to the format and cadence required by the funder.
4. Following all other management and reporting requirements (which vary heavily between grants and funders).

It’s less common for nonprofits to give volunteers major roles in program execution and grant management. However, if your nonprofit enjoys the support of loyal volunteers eager to stay involved or is working with a very small team, finding ways for them to keep helping could be a good choice. This will not only lighten your staff’s workload but also further engage volunteers, inspiring them to help win your next grant.

Consider these ways to engage volunteers:

• Ensure volunteers understand the full grant lifecycle. Give volunteers an overview of grant management and reporting, why it’s so important, and the specific requirements of your new funding. Even if they don’t play direct roles this time, educating them will enrich their understanding of how nonprofits function and give them more context and confidence to play increasingly impactful roles in your organization’s work.
• Give them a role in the project or additional grant training. Supporting the funded program or project could be a more interesting way to keep volunteers engaged, and it’ll give them a full view of the process from research to proposal to on-the-ground impact. The scope of this involvement will naturally vary between projects and volunteers, but it can’t hurt to consider what possible roles might be and gauge interest. If volunteers enjoyed working on the grant proposal, actively encourage them to learn more! Tons of grant writing training options can be found online these days.
• Provide an easy, effective hours tracking process. These logistics are important for volunteer programs in general, but they may be necessary for some grants if volunteers play direct roles in running the funded projects or programs. For example, most matching grants can count volunteer hours towards your organization’s cost share. The more mundane systems of your volunteer program can heavily shape supporters’ experiences, so make sure they’re hassle-free to boost satisfaction and retention.
  
  

Key takeaways: Volunteers can play hugely impactful roles in grant seeking. However, remember that researching, prioritizing, applying for, and managing grants is a complicated process. Keep volunteers’ experience levels in mind and proactively provide the support and resources they need to succeed. 

Then, with your bases covered and a winning proposal coming together, seize opportunities to keep volunteers engaged. Let them see their hard work come to life. Supporters who enjoy driving this kind of direct impact for your mission should be treasured and retained!