r/grantwriting

Ok, several months ago I signed up for an online course to better learn grant writing. I had already been working as a grant writer for a small company and left that company and wanted to strike out on my own. Within 30 days of signing up for the course which was $6,000 for the year, they changed the program to be a three-tiered system, with the new program and gatekeeping it would now cost well over $15,000 for the year. Not once was I ever asked to sign a new contract in agreement to the change in the program and the course!

Talk about a bait and switch!!!!

So now the limited information that I'm getting cost $3,000 for the year and I don't have access to all the information, which I did in the original program of $6,000 for the year.

Also there are several people in the program, we've been talking privately, about their so-called earn $15,000 in 3 months, which is a bunch of BS, they sell this course to sound like you're going to make so much money so quickly, and it's absolutely not true!

So if anybody is considering signing up for this program I would very strongly warn you against it.

At least they only got me for $3,000.

I’m a developer from Hamilton wokring on a project focused specifically on Canadian nonprofit funding and proposal workflows.

I’m trying to better understand where the operational friction actually is before building further.

The recurring pain points I’ve heard so far:

A) tracking Canadian funding opportunities manually

B) scattered files/documents

C)repetitive proposal information

D)collaboration across teams

E)managing multiple deadlines and submissions at once

I built an early MVP to explore this workflow space, but I’m mainly looking for honest feedback from people involved in Canadian proposal development or nonprofit operations.

A few questions:

What part of proposal management consumes the most time?

Are you mostly using spreadsheets/docs today?

Are there Canadian-specific challenges existing tools don’t handle well?

What would actually make your workflow easier?

Not selling anything — genuinely trying to validate whether this is a meaningful problem worth solving properly for Canadian organizations.

So I’m new to freelancing as a grant writer. I’ve been writing grants fairly successfully for the past two years informally - meaning I’ve barely been paid for it, but did it for experience. Where do I find more clients online? Do I need to constantly post about what I’m doing? Go to certain websites? Forums? To say I need help is an understatement at this point. Suggestions? Advice?

Hey all,

Hoping for some insights into the grant writing space.

I’m starting to explore freelance grant support work focused solely on the research and narrative-support side of grants: demographic data pulls and summaries, mini literature reviews/evidence syntheses, and a grant-ready narrative about community need and/or the problem a nonprofit is addressing. I’m not looking to do the full grant writing package, budgeting, prospect research, or grant management stuff.

For people who hire or work with grant writers: is this a real service people outsource?
If so, what title would you use for this kind of work? I’m trying to figure out whether this is best described as grant research, proposal support, needs assessment support, or something else entirely.

I've been reading scientific literature on environmental health for ~15 years and translating that into professional educational course content, so data/information synthesis/narrative writing comes easy to me and is fun. I've been told by a few folks in the NP space that this is valuable, but given that I really only want to do this part of grant writing work, I'm not sure how to market myself.

Appreciate any thoughts, insights, or feedback!

TY!