Building bridges: Five nonprofit grant writers on learning the profession Sarah K. Gunning Towson University sgunning@towson.edu Denelle Joynes Johns Hopkins University denellejoynes@gmail.com Ashley McMullen Community Free Clinic and Brooke’s House ashleypmcmullen@gmail.com Justine Trybus The CASH Campaign of Maryland justine.trybus@gmail.com Abstract - This paper features results of an online focus group conversation among five nonprofit proposal writers (also colloquially known as “grant writers”) in the early to mid-stages of their careers, reflecting on the roles that job training, mentorship, professional organizations, and a course in nonprofit proposal writing have had on their career knowledge and success. The study found that historical and cultural knowledge of the community, the organization, and the project being funded seemed to be of equal importance to experiences in training or mentoring. The paper shares the experiences of learning these skills within a university level grant writing course and the participants provide recommendations for new grant professionals. Index Terms – Nonprofit grant writing, nonprofit writing, technical writing, community writing, community knowledge, training, coursework, proposals. INTRODUCTION How do nonprofit proposal writers learn their jobs? The professional communication field has not substantially investigated this question. In fact, research on proposal writing has languished over the past 15 years, and when it is addressed, it is mainly in academic settings rather than nonprofit ones. Academic proposal writing is quite different in the types of projects and collaborative methods nonprofit proposal writers use [1]. This study sought to understand more about how nonprofit proposal writers learned their jobs and what components writers felt were most important to their success. LITERATURE REVIEW This section will discuss how most studies find that nonprofit writers often learn their job as lone writers, that it is uncertain how many nonprofit grant professionals have had coursework in proposal development, and that we know a bit about coursework coverage and pedagogy. I. Little research exists within professional communication about the nonprofit proposal writing profession Studies that focus primarily on the nonprofit proposal writing experience tend to be outside the field of professional communication. Some include field studies in nonprofit leadership and management [2], interviews and site explorations [3, 4, 5, 6], or large scale, national surveys 4 7, 8, 9 10, 11]. Researchers in nonprofit management have studied fundraisers/proposal writers, but few are in the realm of how they learn their job duties [1, 3, 4, 5]. Over the past 15 years, these studies have provided solid starting points for how nonprofit proposal writing is accomplished in the United States. II. Most nonprofit proposal writers learn on-the-job as a lone writer Nonprofit proposal writers don’t often have other writers within their organization to ask for advice or mentoring [1, 2, 3, 8]. Davidson [3] conducted interviews with nonprofit proposal writers in the Southwest United States, asking about their proposal writing processes. She found that most work as “lone writers,” employed as the only proposal writer within their organization and have had little official training within their organization. Most writers report having to learn on their own, with few procedures documented within the organization. “Lone writers” are common in the nonprofit sector; many proposal writers report that they learned their job duties on their own [1, 2, 3]. Hager et al. [2] conducted a survey with 1,540 nonprofit organizations on how fundraising is carried out in the U.S. and found that only 25% of nonprofit organizations had one full time employee employed as a grant writer/fundraiser, indicating most of those worked as lone writers.