(And When to Get Help)
There’s a question that most business owners, not-for-profit leaders, and government project managers face at some point, “Should we write this application ourselves, or is it worth bringing in a specialist?” The honest answer is that it depends.
Not every grant application justifies the cost of external support, and there are situations where a well-resourced internal team can produce a strong submission without additional help. But there are also situations where the choice to handle it internally carries a cost that only becomes clear after the outcome.
This article is a practical framework for thinking through that decision before you begin.
When writing it yourself makes sense
For smaller grants with straightforward guidelines, an experienced internal team can usually produce a competitive application. Programs under approximately $20,000, rounds with simple eligibility criteria, and opportunities where your organisation has submitted successfully in the past are reasonable candidates for an in-house approach.
The key test is whether your team has capacity to read the guidelines carefully, structure the response around the assessment criteria, gather the evidence the funder is asking for, and complete a final review, all within the available timeline and without significantly disrupting core operations. If all of that is genuinely possible, and the funding amount is modest relative to the time investment, a self-written application is probably the best choice.
When it is worth getting help
This calculation shifts considerably for larger or more complex funding opportunities. A grant worth over $35,000 or more represents a return that makes a professional application proportionally worthwhile. This is because the cost of an unsuccessful submission is higher in writing time, the wait, the absence of usable feedback. Consideration must also go to what might happen if the project has to be deferred.
External support can make a measurable difference when the guidelines are difficult to interpret – which is often! Grant guidelines are government documents written in government-speak and they carry policy intent behind every phrase. Terms like “demonstrated community benefit”, “organisational capacity to deliver”, and “alignment with program objectives” appear frequently and sound straightforward. However, in practice, they are often codewords for the specific types of evidence the funder expects to see, and what counts can vary between programs and between rounds. Reading guidelines well takes significant experience with how funding bodies think.
Help is also useful when the program is highly competitive as grant rounds can attract hundreds of applications for a limited pool of funding. In those environments, the quality of communication becomes a deciding factor in ways it might not be in a round with more limited competition.
Most of the time, applications are written by someone already at capacity. They are often submitted under time pressure by a team member whose primary expertise is not grant writing and this combination tends to produce unsuccessful applications. In this common scenario, not only has the organisation wasted money on the hours of work put in, they’ve also taken a valuable team member away from their normal duties.
When the funding is significant to the organisation’s trajectory, projects where the grant would materially change what becomes possible get lost into future “plans”. The consequences of undelivered great ideas can threaten the team’s confidence and change the course of the business. It can also affect whether or not they try again for funding in the future.
What about timing?
One factor that is often underestimated is lead time. Far too many people believe that competitive applications can be knocked out in a week. However, the research into program intent, gathering the evidence, structuring the narrative around weighted criteria, and the review process all take time, and obviously better outcomes happen when there is enough time to work these elements properly.
Organisations that consistently access funding tend to be aware of upcoming rounds well before they open and this lead time makes a meaningful difference to the quality of the submission. A decision made six weeks before a deadline with time to properly prepare is a fundamentally different situation to the same decision made two weeks before.
The conclusion
At its core, the question isn’t “can we write this ourselves?” because most organisations can produce a nice-sounding draft. The real question has to be, “What does a competitive application require for this program, and do we have the combination of guidelines, knowledge, evidence, narrative structure, and available time to produce it?”
Grant writing sits at the intersection of policy literacy, persuasive writing, project management, and evidence-based argumentation. And while most businesses and not-for-profits have some of those skills internally, it’s less common to have all of them at the level a significant funding round requires, and also have a team that’s not already at capacity with other work.
Before deciding, it is worth mapping your situation honestly against the program you are considering. Look at what the grant is worth, what does a competitive submission actually require, what will it cost your team in time and focus, and what does an unsuccessful outcome mean for your project?
If you are working through a specific opportunity and would like a sounding board, get in touch through the website.
