Discover the Internet Connection Billing Format for Nonprofit Organizations

Internet connection billing format for Nonprofit

[Music] welcome to Growing for good with Mandy I am Mandy Pierce and I own funding for good and this is our very first Vlog Vlog vog video blog and I am excited to talk to you about something I got a phone call about just this week I had someone call me and ask me how much should I ask to be paid as a grant writer and I get one of two kinds of questions people either ask me how much should I pay a grant Rider or Consultants or people that are just starting out in the field will ask me how much should I ask to be paid so I'm going to give you the first answer for how much you should pay someone that's a grant writer and then I'm going to tell you my personal opinion about how much you should ask to be paid I always tell folks you need to make it very clear about what you're asking a grant writer to do for you it could be that you're asking them to do research you could be asking them to do the actual writing the development of programs program design you could be asking them to not only write the grant but to write the reporting at the end of the grant to follow up with those reports if their name name is on the grant that's a different level of commitment for a grant writer and then you need to look at their experience level are they brand new have they written a lot and how successful with those have they been sometimes people will say to me well I'm 100% successful I'm like well that's great how many grants have you written and they may say two so it's easy to say you've received two grants and you have 100% return on investment but you want to find someone with experience with local grants and Foundations with State and with federal grants so those are all very very different types of writing and come with very different skill sets you want to talk to someone who has relationships in your area with the foundations that you're going to be working with and with someone who has the type of experience in your field that is going to help them write really successful narratives so um rates sometimes people say to me well we want to do commission-based hiring I don't know any grant writers who are members of any professional organizations such as the association of fundraising professionals or other uh cfre that will do commission-based work it's against our code of ethics so if I do work for you I expect to be paid for that work I cannot guarantee anyone ever that a grant is going to be funded and nobody can not even a program officer they can say we think our board is very inclined to support this type of project but they have no idea what the board is going to vote on and decide to actually give money to so to expect a grant writer to only be paid if you get funded is absurd you need to pay someone for the work that they've done I always give people the rationale if you're going to go to the doctor you're not going to only pay them if they cure you or tell you what's wrong you're going to pay them for their time you're going to pay them for your visit and that's part of they've been trained to do it and they're going to do it the best they can just like a grant writer they're going to submit the most quality proposal possible but they cannot guarantee that you're going to receive funding so that's the first thing no commission based pay and then you have to talk to a grant writer and determine whether they want to do hourly based work or contractual work based on the the grant like I'm going to charge you X number of dollars to complete this grant as opposed to numbers of hours and then it really depends on your area go online and look and see what grant writers are being paid in your area and what an average base is and go from there based on their experience now how much do I ask to be paid as a consultant I had this conversation on Sunday with a girl that called me from Colorado and this is what I told her um what I do is going to be different for everyone but what I do is I base my work on my experience my success rate and the amount of time that's going to be involved with the project I have been grant writing for over 18 years and I've been grant writing for pay for over 11 years so I've had clients hiring me for a very long time to write grants for them I've written hundreds of local grants with local foundations I've written hundreds of um online grants iners handwriting and submitting grants online and state and federal grants as as well we also have a very high success rate funding for good has over 91% success rate for the grants that we've written and so those two things combin with the number of years we've had experience in lots of different nonprofit fields from art to hospitals Health and Human Service um YMCAs Girl Scouts we've we've worked with lots and lots of different organizations so we have a lot of connections in our area then people want to access those connections they want us to be able to help them create Partnerships and collaborations so I take what the base pay is for grant writers in our area and our region which I can find online and add some to that for my experience and My Success level and then this is the key to what I do with what funding for good does with clients I give a quote for what I anticipate the work to to be whether it's going to be a 10 hours of my time or 12 hours of my time and I tell my client this is how much I anticipate doing and this is how much it will cost I charge 50% of that upfront and then what I do is actually keep track of the hours I've worked if it didn't take me the time that I estimated it would take I don't charge them for the whole amount that I estimated I charge them for the amount of time it took if it takes me longer than I estimated I don't charge them for more than I told them because that's not fair and that doesn't help them prepare their budget so I do that work at the fee that I told them I would charge um so you know that way everybody feels comfortable and confident and it helps me gauge how much time it's going to take me to do projects and it gives my clients a very fair rate I've never had a client compain complain about that process um and then the remainder is due upon completion of the grant if it's a really really long Grant application process and it's going to take me three or four months I might say 50% up front and then another quarter when three4 is done and then the remainder upon the completion of the grant but usually it's 50/50 and I've never had a problem with that I've never had a client comp complain about that and and that is how we do things at funding for good so join us next week for our next Vlog and sign on to funding forg good.org if you want to learn more read some of our blogs from the [Music] past