u/saillavee

I’m working as a contract grant writer for a small nonprofit. I’ve been writing grants with them for about a year, and it’s gone quite well. They’re a young charity with pretty minimal staff, mostly a small team of contractors like myself who report to the ED.

When I started with them, their fundraising had been quite successful thanks to a very well-connected board, but also a little haphazard. Basically a spray and pray approach that left the ED scrambling to pigeon hole successful grants into under-resourced areas of the budget. When I was hired, this was something the ED noted that she wanted to address.

I worked with the ED on taking a more strategic approach - we got an account for a grant database to amp up research, built out a tracking system for active grants and their associated projects, and created a budget map for each of their programs so I could make requests to funders that were based on actual expenses. My results have been good, and we’ve managed to keep existing funding renewed, crack a couple of funders that they’d unsuccessfully been applying to for a couple of years, and had good results with brand new funders.

I come at this work with a pretty long history as a grant writer and experience as a grant officer and juror myself, so I think I’ve got a pretty decent handle on what kinds of things read well to a review committee, and what small things can trip a jury up and make for a poorly-received application. That’s my wheelhouse, and I’ll freely admit that the other areas of fundraising like events and individual donor solicitation are not my strong suit.

The ED went on mat leave for a year, and an interim ED has stepped in, and the work that we’ve put in to strategizing grant writing has gone out the window. I think the interim ED wants to follow up on every suggestion from the board, and make fundraising even more aggressive, so it’s slipping back into a haphazard approach, and I’m feeling a little micromanaged.

Basically, she’s got me applying to grants that we’re not eligible for, and she wants me asking for the maximum amount for every application. I’ve passed along application packages for her to review, and she’s completely re-written budgets to max out requests, pulled statistics out of thin air (the organization actually does a great job of tracking quantitative data, so I’ve got really solid statistics I can pull when I’m building applications), and interjected pieces of writing into applications that are grandiose, unsubstantiated, and clearly AI-generated.

I’ve tried to gently push back - noting when I don’t think we’re eligible for a particular funding stream, showing her where I’m gathering my data from, why I’ve identified the specific funders that I have and what I’m looking for when I do my research, and where I’m getting my budgets from… but it’s mostly falling on deaf ears. Her response is usually “it might be a stretch, but let’s give it a shot.”

She’s really talked up her fundraising and grant-writing skills, and it’s honestly got me questioning my whole approach. I’m all for talking an organization up in a grant, setting aspirational targets, and a little bit of budget padding, but mostly I like to work within real need and make sure we can back our claims. Is my approach way too conservative? Am I being a little defensive and overly cautious?

I’m leaving my job and shifting into self-employment. It’s going well so far (yay!) but my income will mostly be coming in the form of large, unpredictable, not at all guaranteed chunks 1-2 time a year.

I’ve read over the articles on YNAB’s website for unpredictable income, and I have a good handle on what my targets need to be for recurring and less predictable expenses, but I’m still a little bit nervous about how to map out my money now that so much of it is coming in sporadically.

Heres what I’ve been thinking:

I have my budget separated out into 3 section: basic cost of living (bills and food), goals (savings and important, but flexible expenses), and wants (travel, eating out, etc).

My husband’s income (stable salary) is enough to cover our basic cost of living, so I’m thinking I just leave that section for when he gets paid and keep it covered a month ahead.

When I get a big influx of income, I apply it to the “goals” section and take it as far as I can, so that I can see how long that income will last us. Some of these lines are for monthly spending with monthly targets, others are targets with deadlines that I can fill up in full once I’m paid.

After that, we use anything left over from my husband’s paycheques and the monthly income that I bring in to cover our “wants” section, which will hopefully be met a month ahead, but realistically will probably be a bit of a whack-a-mole situation. I’m cool with it being like that as long as all I’m doing is shuffling money around in that section and not taking money from needs and goals to cover overspending our wants.

I know a lot of people make a line for “next month’s spending” which is kind of tempting, but I do want to see how far my sporadic income will take us, so I’m thinking I budget it out into future months, even if that’s taking us 6-12 months into the future.

What do y’all think? Ok system or does this sound like a mess? I’m very open to suggestions!