A reader writes:
I’ve been doing some remote volunteer grant writing as part of a long-term plan to break out of my current job family (also nonprofit-centric). The nonprofit I’m currently working with is only a few years old, in another state, and very small, with no paid staff. My main contact is the executive director, Helena.
The deadline for the biggest grant of the year is tonight. I’ve finished the actual writing and have all the required documents, except the FY25 budget. We can’t submit if any fields are empty. I’ve requested the budget a few times; each time, Helena has responded with FY24’s revenue/expense report. It’s basically that scene in “The Good Place” where Michael repeatedly requests Eleanor’s file and gets cacti in return. Neither of the two volunteer bookkeepers has been very responsive. Q1 ended yesterday.
Last night, I had the following text exchange with Helena:
Me: Have we heard from Natalie about the budget?
Helena: No
Me: Definitely don’t want to stress her (or you!) out, but I want to submit within the next few hours — would the senior bookkeeper know anything?
Helena: They are very slow on returning emails. Do we need the 2025 budget since we’re only in month 3?
Me: Yeah, they require a budget for the current fiscal year. It doesn’t have to be exact since grants, etc are uncertain. Just needs to make logical sense based on last year’s financials
Helena: Do you have last year’s budget I sent you?
Me: I have the revenue/expenses spreadsheet. I think that’s technically different from a budget?
Helena: I don’t think we have a budget for any year then. I thought the revenue/expenses was the budget.
Me: Last year’s application [which was rejected for incompleteness] had one — basically our expectation for how much we’ll bring in vs allocate to different line items. The revenue/expenses is for what’s already happened.
Helena: Then I think Devon who did the grant came up with it.
Me: Hm. I don’t feel at all qualified to do that.
Helena: Then we’ll have to wait on Natalie.Email from Helena an hour later: “See attachment for 2024 budget.” (It was
a cactusthe revenue/expense report.)My final reply: “Hi Helena, I believe I already have this — just waiting on the projected budget for 2025 (rough estimate is fine). Thanks!”
I’ve left it there for now. But holy shit, Alison. That exchange seemed so beyond the realm of possibility that I started to think I must not know what a budget is. I even texted my uncle, an accounting professor, for a sanity check. I think Helena is hoping I’ll cave and throw together a budget like Devon did last year, but I have to draw the line somewhere.
I’ve invested considerable time and energy in this grant, enduring other displays of incompetence that could justify their own letters. It would be one thing to be rejected on the merits; that’s an unavoidable part of this work. I just can’t believe it might all come to nothing for such an inane, preventable reason.
I’m definitely not expecting an answer before the deadline, but I’d appreciate knowing how you would have handled this. Should I wash my hands of this unless/until I get a real budget? If so, should I explicitly tell Helena that the ball is 100% in her court? Should I make one last overture to ask if I should submit the “budget” she sent, be told “yes”, and watch her FAAFO? Some other option? Whatever I choose, how should I deal with the fallout?
So, the deal with tiny new nonprofits with no paid staff (and sometimes tiny nonprofits with staff, too, but it’s especially likely when they have none) is that they are very, very often learning as they go, and things may be in chaos.
Nonprofits are often founded by someone who’s really passionate about the work they’ve set out to do (like helping a vulnerable population, changing an unjust law, or whatever it is) but who don’t currently have the skills to build and run an effective organization. Typically one of two things happens:
1. They build those skills along the way, figuring it out as they go, often with some bumpy early years, but in the end successfully professionalizing their operations.
Or…
2. They don’t build those skills and things stay in chaos, meaning their impact remains very limited and they have trouble keeping staff and volunteers. (And in fact, the worst version of this is when they’re good at attracting funding but bad at the rest of it, because then those resources get squandered and more people are affected.)
Organizations in the first category can be great to volunteer with in their early stages, because there’s room for you to have a significant impact (which translates into accomplishments for your resume if you’re using the work to try to move into a new field). But organizations in the second category are pretty much always going to be an exercise in frustration and not a good use of your time or energy.
I don’t know which one you’re dealing with, but it’s possible that it’s the first one, and that Helena just needs help moving the organization in that direction. If you keep observing, you’ll know soon enough if that’s the case or not.
Either way, though, it sounds like you’re dancing around the budget issue too much. You need to just come out and say, “Most grant-giving foundations will not consider applications without a budget for the current fiscal year. We cannot apply without having that. Once we have a current year budget, we can use it for multiple applications, but it’s a prerequisite to be seriously considered for funding and it doesn’t make sense to submit applications until there’s one I can include.” Feel free to add, “That is not something I can create myself; it would need to come from the organization’s leadership.” You could also attach a few very basic samples from other small organizations as templates so that it’s clear what you’re talking about.
If we could go back in time, I’d say that ideally you would have laid that out earlier on so they weren’t scrambling at the last minute … but it’s also completely understandable that you figured a budget would already exist.
That said … if it were just this confusion over a budget, I’d be more inclined to think, “Okay, they’re at the very start of learning about all this, let’s see how they do once the requirements are spelled out.” But you mentioned other displays of incompetence that could justify their own letters, so it’s worth questioning whether this organization is the right one for you to invest time and energy into. Volunteer grant writing can be a great way to get the experience to move in that direction professionally, but you’ll need successes from the work to point to. If your efforts are all for naught because Helena is a disaster, it’s not going to be a good use of your time.
One thing to look at in particular: aside from the budget situation, what results is this organization getting? Is Helena actually good at the core of the work she’s set out to do, and can the organization point to concrete results it’s achieved? If so, and if Helena is open to getting some basic support as the org professionalizes, I’d be more inclined to give that support a chance to pay off.
But otherwise, I’d think hard about whether this is the right situation to give you grant-writing experience. If you conclude that it’s not, don’t view it as “it all coming to nothing.” View it as learning a very useful lesson about things to screen an organization on before you invest time helping them!
