The Similarities Between Grant Writing and Designing Research

I took a grant writing course years ago before I ever worked at a nonprofit. The course work was engaging and the process a bit overwhelming for someone who had never been part of a nonprofit organization. Needless to say, I have worked at a few nonprofits since then and participated in the grant process. Generally, I worked on the back end of the grant writing process preparing grant reports and maintaining the records of assessments so that we could keep the grants we got. Luckily, I was good at this having found immediate similarities to my days in a social psychology research lab.

Recently I reentered the grant writing process out of a need to boost my writing income. Although I often work as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) in the area of psychology, my first love was psychological research. Unfortunately, life happened and I never completed my Ph.D., so I rarely have the opportunity to do more than reading research for the pieces I create as a ghostwriter. That said, I will never forget how much I enjoyed unraveling the mystery behind creating a really good research experiment.

In many ways developing a psychological experiment is similar to developing any large writing project. Consideration has to be given to the backstory that won’t ever make its appearance on the stage of the piece. And a great deal of attention is paid to getting the participants to enter into a place of suspended disbelief.

If you never had the joy of participating in the design of a research experiment, you may be surprised to hear that the researcher has to develop a red herring to distract the participants. This little white lie has to be a believable redirection for the participant’s curiosity to keep them from helping or undoing the purpose of your research. Yes, researchers who are well-liked are often hindered by the help of curious participants while those who are dealing with antisocial personality types can be undone by intentional sabotage of their research project.

The similarities between grant writing and research design are a bit less dramatic in nature but still worth discussing. When you begin working with any nonprofit as a grant writer, you first engage in research. You have to develop an understanding of the purpose of the nonprofit. You will often need to do an equivalent of a brief literature review to understand the potential impact of the nonprofit you’re writing for. This is often, whether you provide an extensive understanding of the impact or must fit your intention within a window of 150 words as is often the case, the true core of what you are creating. If there is no clear impact to be obtained by the work of the nonprofit you’re writing for, you are very unlikely to get funding.

Just as you must with any research project, you will need to create a working hypothesis that your funder can buy into. Whether you are seeking to increase the literacy outcomes of participants in a summer educational enrichment program or seeking to provide transportation for a drop-in center for severely and persistently mentally ill individuals, you have to be able to assess how the funding you receive improved the lives of those your nonprofit serves. This clearly mimics research where an experimenter must prove their intervention produced a change in what they sought to measure. I could go into a discussion of independent and dependent variables here, but unless you are a psychology nut like me, you wouldn’t appreciate the digression.

In this day of goal setting, this process is probably easier to understand than it was for me when I first got a research assistantship. As a researcher, you make a prediction of expected outcomes. As a grant writer, you make a prediction of how your project or program will impact those you serve. Then you gather information/data that will be used in your report, whether that is a research report or a grant report. Of course, you will also need to analyze your data and let your funder know how well outcomes met expectations. In grant writing, this is performed through the grant reports that generally accompany a grant award. Just as you would fail to be published for an underwhelming research study, you are unlikely to obtain further funding from a source if you fail to prove the value of your nonprofit project or neglect to meet the expectations you set forth in the proposal.